I’ve just arrived back at school this morning after a fantastic weekend in Wellington. The highlight of this weekend was getting to hang out with the fantastic group of librarians and educators who came along to support the SLANZA Wellington weekend school. I got to catch up with some very dear colleagues and I enjoyed meeting so many new people, all of them passionate about school libraries. (My next blog post will be about one particularly amazing primary school librarian I met who is a total inspiration!)
I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to present a workshop on using curation tools for professional development as well as teaching and learning and after a quick overview from me on some of the hows and whys and a quick look my top curation tools, it was about rolling our sleeves up, getting our fingers tapping those keyboards and doing it for ourselves.
The buzz in the room was amazing as everyone shared and discussed and asked questions about whatever tool they were interested in using, and thanks to Wellington Girls College IT guy Steve, the computers and the internet played the game and didn’t cause us any hiccups. Also a big thanks to the Wellington SLANZA committee for inviting me to be part of their workshop and to Lynne from Wellington Girls College for hosting us. It’s an amazing school library and it’s going to be an awesome hub for next year’s SLANZA conference. Remember people – Wellington, July 2013 is where it’s going to be happening!
As you can see from my presentation, my top two tools currently are Diigo and Livebinders. I’d love to hear what your top tools are and how you use them. As an example, here’s a great blog posting by
Librarians Are Go blog author and librarian from Sydney.
Before SLANZA conference in Wellington last year I really didn’t know a huge amount about any of these curation tools and and certainly hadn’t thought about how I could use them in my professional practice. Between
Judy O’Connell and
Joyce Valenza I was overwhelmed by the possibilities and my brain was racing at a million miles an hour with ideas of how I might just be able to do some of this stuff! Experience has taught me to do a brain dump of all my thoughts and ideas and then go about organising and prioritising them according to how much time do I need or have, what skills or tools do I need, how big is the project and how sustainable is it. You should see my To Do list!! 🙂
And finally, just hot off the press, an article in
School Library Monthly by Joyce on
Curation. It’s a must-read if you want to know why you can’t ignore it.
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sengawhite.nz 
Excellent slideshare Senga – thanks for posting it. I use Diigo, Evernote, (both more as a belt-and-braces thing) scoopit & have just joined Learnist but not done anything on it yet. My curation has mainly been professional sharing rather than curation of sites for library collection development, but that is developing too. Pinterist I mainly use for home, tho I do add to one called “books worth reading” when I remember…
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Thanks Catherine
I’ve also joined Learnist but am taking a “wait and see” approach. I might have time in the holidays to have a “play” with that and Scholrly, which I just had my invitation accepted to. It’s actually remembering what tool you’re using for what purpose that can get tricky sometimes!
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Thanks for this Senga I am a fan of scoopit which is useful for professional sharing for me too. I use bitly to save links which I really like as well.
Great sharing
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Bitty is so handy for shortening URLs I forget it has other functions too!
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“Thank you all for sharing your Livebinder experiences and your suggestions. My HOD Eng/Social Studies has now had a play and created one for herself. She is thinking of getting a class to develop a ‘Binder each with at least 2 links within and then will use this as a teaching tool to evaluate what resources they have collected modelled on Kathy Schrock’s evaluation sheets.” via Marrion Clark, Roxburgh Area School
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