Goal 10: Spread Your Knowledge (15+ Tools to Bookmark, Aggregate, Curate)

Goal 10 of The 30 Goals Challenge for Educators! Click the link to find out more about the new changes to this year’s 30 Goals Challenge for Educators!

““If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. ” ~ Margaret Fuller

Short-term– share resources you have collected about a topic with colleagues at school or online. Teach your students to use online bookmarking, curation, and aggregation tools to gather and organize their knowledge. Try one of the suggested resources below.
Long-term– develop a community for sharing resources in your teaching environment. You can do this by having a newsletter, a collective blog, a wiki, Google site, Facebook group or other landing place for the information you gather. You can even create a hashtag on Twitter where you encourage your colleagues and/or students to use to share their knowledge. Establishing a community for learning helps support and encourage continuous learning.

My Personal Thoughts About This Goal

As educators, we are in the business of learning. One of the most important missions I have as an educator is to help my students become continuous learners. I think of it as part of a Hippocratic Oath for teachers. We have the mission to encourage and equip our students with the skills to be continuous learners. This means that I am also a continuous learner and a resource sharer. Daily, I aggregate, curate, bookmark, and share resources using webtools and social networks. Also, I teach my students how to do this for research and to help them have these resources collected and organized throughout their learning journeys.

Resources Related to This Goal

I love learning. I believe the reason this has not become overwhelming for me is because I learn in the way that is most engaging for me. I use tools I enjoy and work for my learning style and stick to those few. Below I will list a few free webtools to help you bookmark, aggregate, curate, and share resources with others. I have listed what I believe are the most effective tools at the top of the list, but I’ve listed more that are great just don’t meet my criteria.
The tools that I use meet a few criteria:

• They have a free app! I do most of my sharing using my smart devices. I have an Android, iPad, and iPod so I look for sites that have a free app for all 3!
• They have a bookmarklet or extension that I can add to my browser. I use Chrome. This makes curating on the web take seconds versus minutes and saves me so much time!
• They are user friendly and have a platform that is visually pleasing for the audience I’m sharing with. There’s no use in sharing with others if my audience cannot access the resource or see it.

Tools

• Diigo– saves all your bookmarks in one location accessible anywhere with the Internet, allows you to highlight sections on websites and make notes, takes clippings, tag, search, and more! You can easily create weekly automated blog posts with these bookmarks and link to your Twitter account so that anything you favorite or tweet will automatically be included in your library of links. The hashtags you tweet with will be the tags associated with the resource. Has an app for i-devices and Android. Has a bookmarklet for web browsers. Find my resources here, www.diigo.com/user/shellyterrell/
• Delicious-like Diigo in that it saves all your bookmarks in one location accessible anywhere with the Internet and allows you to tag, search, and more! Several other tools are associated with Delicious to allow you to do a lot more with it. You can link to your Twitter account so that anything you favorite or tweet will automatically be included in your library of links. Has an app for i-devices and Android. Has a bookmarklet for web browsers. Find my resources here, http://www.delicious.com/shellterrell
• Evernote– Create text, photo and audio notes that auto-synchronize your notes to your Mac or PC. Makes text within snapshots searchable. Add, sync, access, and share files (PDF, Word, Excel, PPT, and more) among the different versions of Evernote. Has an app for i-devices, Blackberry and Android. Has a bookmarklet for web browsers.
• Livebinders– Create a notebook of your links with tabs that can be clicked and named like a folder. You can even present these resources in the Presentation Mode. It shows the website within each tab. Embed a little icon on webpages and blogs. I don’t like that the bookmarklet takes awhile to upload your link. Has an app for i-devices and Android. Has a bookmarklet for web browsers. Find my binders here!
• PearlTrees– Create a mindmap of your links that is embeddable on websites and blogs! You can click on each link to see the entire webpage. Has an app for i-devices and Android. Has a bookmarklet for web browsers. Find my resources here, http://pearltrees.com/shellyterrell
• Pinterest– Create a beautiful board of your links. It takes any images from the post and allows you to even play videos within the posts. I don’t like that if there are no images then it is difficult to bookmark the site. Has an app for i-devices and Android. Has a bookmarklet for web browsers. Find my resources here, pinterest.com/shellyterrell/
• ScoopIt– Publish a free online magazine with your links. It only allows you 4 free ones but your audience will love the look that includes videos that play and images. You can easily tweet this. Has an app for i-devices and Android. Has a bookmarklet for web browsers. Find my resources here, http://www.scoop.it/u/shelly-s-terrell
• 19Pencils– Bookmark sites for education. You can see and connect to other teachers’ collections and do searches for your grade level and subject. This site is super for educators sharing links or finding links recommended by other teachers! Has a bookmarklet for web browsers.
• Magzinr– created by edtech guru and teacher Russel Tarr! Bookmark, tweet, share, embed and so much more! Has a bookmarklet for web browsers. I need to play with this more.
• NetVibes– A dashboard of links and RSS feeds you enter in it. Gives you great layouts to choose from and has analytics.  Has an app for i-devices and Android. Has a bookmarklet for web browsers. I need to play with this more.
• MentorMob– Create a beautiful playlist of your links.
• Curate– This is more for sharing screen clips of sites embeddable in your blog. I like the look.
• Historious– Similar to Delicious and Diigo but doesn’t have an app for smart devices but does have a bookmarklet.
• Storify– Create beautiful social stories about a topic. It will grab resources you share or create on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more. Has a bookmarklet and extension.
• Linkable– organize links by dragging and drop.

Important News

• Lisa Dabbs and I have decided to change the hashtag to #30GoalsEdu because we have noticed some sports people using the hashtag. Please make the transition.
• This year we are focusing on 1 to 2 goals a week in order to have time to really reflect on the tasks and respond to each other’s posts and enhance our support system for each other.

Check out my Pinterests for other posts with this goal or ask me to add yours!

Challenge:

Share resources you have collected about a topic with colleagues at school or online. Teach your students to use online bookmarking, curation, and aggregation tools to gather and organize their knowledge.

Did you reflect on this goal? Please leave a comment that you accomplished this goal by either posting your own video reflection on Youtube, using the hashtag #30Goals, posting on the 30 Goals Facebook group, adding a post to the GooglePlus page, or adding a comment below!

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