Curating for Action
The Challenge
Curate a collection of resources that can cultivate a shared vision for empowered learning with technology within your school or district.
The Details
Before you begin: Sharing ideas and resources is often a common practice of teacher leaders. Curation can help you collect and organize resources that can then be shared with colleagues. Before you begin this challenge, take a moment to consider AT LEAST one problem of practice that exists in your school. This problem will guide part of your curation quest.
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Next, explore curation tools to choose the one that best fits your style. Possible tools include:
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In the moment: After selecting a curation tool (remember, this should be a tool that you have NOT used before), begin curating. Locate resources that you can share with colleagues in your school or district. Organize these resources in a way that makes it easy for you to locate tools or articles quickly. You should include the following categories:
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Resources and ideas that have the potential for solving the problem(s) of practice within your school or district that you identified
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Tools and teaching ideas for EACH of the 5 Cs: Connect, Communicate, Collaborate, Curate, and Create. Remember we looked at the 5Cs in the lesson Teacher as Learner. Be sure to revisit that before curating. In addition, you might want to read the section The 5Cs in this article: BYOD4L : learning to use own smart devices for learning and teaching through the 5C framework. (These should be individual categories. They may relate to the problem of practice you identified, or should include tools, ideas, articles etc. that are appropriate for your grade level).
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Resources and ideas for ensuring equitable access to technology (this can be separate, or could be included as part of your resources around the 5Cs)
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Resources and ideas for ensuring culturally pro-active teaching practices (this can be separate, or could be included as part of your resources around the 5Cs)
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Remember that your tools and resources needs to be carefully curated. Have a purpose in mind (this might be related to your problem of practice). Not every tool or resource you find will make it to your curation. Keep in mind that the purpose of this assignment is to find NEW tools and ideas. Don't simply put tools and ideas in your collection that you already use in your classroom. Consider organization. It is helpful for you when you (and/or your students) go to use the curation that it have some sort of system (i.e color coding, strategic grouping etc.).
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Complete the challenge: Create a Teacher as Leader post on your blog. Link your curated collection to this post. Then, compose a reflection that explores:
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How you considered the 5+Cs and if they are all represented (and an explanation if you don't have all of them represented).
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Your problem(s) of practice and how the resources you found may help you solve the problem(s)
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Your takeaways from curating resources related to equitable access and culturally pro-active teaching.
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What was your criteria for inclusion into your curation? Are there tools/resources that did not make it in?
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How this curation can help you become a leader in your school/district (consider here connecting back to the text in the Teacher as Leader lesson).
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Include a conversation of what two new to you tools you explored for this challenge. What was your experience with each tool? Would you use it again? Why/How? What helped you make a decision about what you ultimately chose?
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NEW To You tools: We are all entering this course with a different set of tech tools that we regularly use. The idea in this course is to move beyond those that are familiar, and try tools you are not familiar with. Not only will that help you widen your tool box, it will also give you time to play and the opportunity to get the "new user" experience that your students might have when using new tools. Each tool is bringing with it affordances and obstacles that impact teaching and learning. Being able to recognize those helps you to know what tool is best. For each challenge I will ask that you ALWAYS explore at least TWO new tools for each challenge. You will describe these in your "complete the challenge" blog post. Hopefully you will use one of those tools in the challenge, but if those tools will not work for what you are trying to accomplish, and you discuss that you are free to use the tool that would work best in your classroom. This should be more rare than not. Please do not plan to rely on only the Google Suite throughout the course.