Thing 6: Curation

Recipes & Resources for Beginning Bakers

This one was fun and also a bit of a hassle. I've been a Pinterest user for years (and a bit too committed to it if you ask my family). I pin recipes, art ideas, lesson ideas, library decor inspiration, garden ideas. So many pins!

For school, though, I've always curated content onto my school websites. It's pretty quick (after my district has moved to its 3rd website tool in 6 years, I've migrated everything over to my own Google Sites so that I don't have to keep rebuilding everything every few years!) and works well. Cool Tools is urging me to expand my options, though, so I chose to explore Learnist. I like it quite a bit. It looks slick, it can handle a variety of content, and it was pretty easy to use. I had a few headaches getting it to publish (I figured it out, but their FAQ and help sections aren't very complete, and the links to their YouTube tutorials are dead) but I finally did. My LearnBoard is a collection of resources for beginning bakers, since my 11-year-old son is very into baking this summer--it was fun to throw together some things that he can explore.

How might I use this at school? Well, the 8th grade social studies teacher and I are working on a project to get students to evaluate and curate resources, so this would be an interesting option, though I wish there was a collaboration element to Learnist so that we could easily have a class board. I can create a class login that we could all use as a workaround. For my younger students, this would present an easily navigable way to present a collection of resources, whether for first grade animal research, the 4th grade project on the Olympics, my Maker Club kids, or the 5th grade unit on Latin America. Learnist would also be an appealing way to push content out to staff as we ramp up our district STEM/STEAM initiative and explore project-based learning.