I have been working really hard this year to make my lessons more student centered. I try to approach each lesson with my learners individual needs in mind. Whenever I get the opportunity to build in choice and student-driven paths to learning I take advantage of it. Unfortunately this can be a challenge when I am pushing into classrooms and don't always have the decision of how a unit or lesson is structured. Nonetheless there is plenty of opportunity out there when I force myself to approach each lesson and unit through the lens of my diverse learners.
When approaching the topic of curation, most often we are familiar with ways we as teachers or librarians can curate sources for students. However, we need to be empowering our learners and providing them with the skills and resources to curate for their personal learning needs. A great digital tool that is new to me and our district is "Follett Collections." If your school uses Follett it is well worth the time to explore this tool, I know I am glad that I did.
How I would use the tool
In 5th grade are students are going to be working on gathering research from multiple sources to help them build a brochure that would convince someone to come and visit their preselected country. In the beginning of the unit students will came to the library where we will walk through the "Wonder" stage of inquiry and students will collaborate on a Padlet, sharing ideas about what makes a country successful. After we determine that culture, economy, geography, history and government are all important to a country's success, we will then have a plan for what information we need to collect in the "investigate" stage of research. However, they won't have a place to curate all the information/ resources they collect. This is where the need for the "Follett Collections" tool will come in.
Typically during the investigate stage, I teach students new resources that will help them with the specific topic of study. This is extremely valuable, but only scratches the surface of the skills during this stage of inquiry. In addition it also doesn't really personalize the learning for students, sure I am giving them an option for sources, but I am not teaching how to curate resources or giving them the ownership of evaluating their own resources. They are just using the tools I share to gather their information because I told them that it was a reliable and good resource. I would consider this to be a total teacher driven lesson. Wanting to improve this unit and focus on making this particular lesson more student-centered and applicable to learning beyond this particular lesson, I will shift my approach.
When we begin the "investigate" stage we will review all the resources that they have already learned and which ones they thought would be useful for this assignment. I will then share a few new resources (books, database, websites, etc) with them. I will tell them that I am not going to tell them what resources that they have to use for this assignment, but that they are going to have to use all the skills they have learned since the Fall for evaluating resources to gather reliable and meaningful resources for this unit. This will create a need for them to have a place to gather their resources, which will lead into a great discussion about curation.
Modeling tool for teachers and students
I will then model for students and for the teachers (often model for both at the same time) how to use Follett Collections to gather their resources in one place. I will us Puerto Rico as my country because I just visited there and it isn't a country that one of them has. I curate a resource from a website, database, and a book from the catalog, so they will see how to do all three. I will highlight the bookmarklet tool, and place emphasis on evaluating my resources before I curate them.
This tool is extremely powerful in that it allows students to add a bookmarklet to their toolbar so that they can add resources to their collection when they are on websites or in databases. They can even add resources directly from the catalog to their "Follett collection", by clicking "add to collections" when in the catalog. After showing them the following basic steps to creating a collection, I will set them off the establish a collection and start using it for their personal inquiries:
- how to login to their personal account in the catalog (Google authenticated)
- how to open collections in side toolbar
- how name a collection
- how to add a bookmarklet to their toolbar
- how to add a resource to their collection
As an aside...
I would eventually like their classmates to be able to search their collections, which is an option, but right now the collections at our school are set to "private." Eventually, I will figure out how to make them available to other students at Lake George, but it is a greyed out. I would eventually like to explore this option further. I think having a larger audience for their curation, puts more emphasis on the importance of curating quality resources and that our learning can help others, so I would love to add that option.
Along with teaching the tool, I am going to use Jennifer Gonzalez's (who I love) verbiage of "curator or dumper" to drive home the point of meaningful curation. Together we will brainstorm the benefits of this curation tool and hopefully be able to "drive home" the message that this tool is going to help them organize their personal resources in one place so that when they go to take notes all their resources that are meaningful to their individual inquiry will be together. I am then going to use the brainstorming session to springboard into a conversation (through pair-and-share strategy) about how curating is a skill that helps us organize and make the note-taking stage easier, so then we may not want to "dump" every resource we find. However, I will remind them that we each have strategies that work best for us and our personal learning style. If "dumping" works better for them and then going back into their collection and evaluating works, then they certainly have that option. However, I will acknowledge that this might require them to go back out and gather more resources later if they find out they don't have enough good resources. Overall, I want them to understand the value of being a good consumer of information and the need to evaluate the sources we decide to curate.
Send them on their way:
After I am done modeling, then I am going to send them on their way to explore the tool and begin curating resources for their own personal inquiries. I will walk around the room to help troubleshoot and coach them through the process. When they get to curating resources, I will ask questions about why they chose the resource that they did.
Sample Collection
If you are a Follett user and you haven't explored "collections" I highly recommend it. Here is a sample collection:
How will this transform my work with colleagues
I am hoping by modeling and showcasing this powerful tool for curation that teachers will see how this tool can work for curation in other subject areas as well. Potentially this could open up other opportunities for me to collaborate with teachers.
Additionally, I am modeling the importance of teaching curation skills and also how to seamlessly integrate technology and ISTE standards into their content areas. The more I model this in front of teachers the better chances that they will roll this into their instruction as well.
Some of the ISTE Standards that I will be able to embed in this lesson are:
ISTE Standards for Students:
Empowered Learner
1.b.- students will be able to customize their learning environment in ways that support their learning process.
Knowledge Constructor:
3.c. - students are able to curate information from digital resources using a "Follett Collections."
ISTE Standards for Educators:
Leader
2.c- I will model for colleagues the exploration and curation of new digital tools for learning.
Designer
5.b.- I designed and authentic learning activity that used digital tools and resources to gather information that they will use to meet social studies content standards.
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