I enjoyed the learning that was produced this week. I thought it was cool learning about the basics of content creation where you read the information, then filter it, edit it, create it and share it. It was like I was putting a name to the type of research most of us do, but without realizing it is called content curation. The steps of content curation reminded me of writing my history papers in my undergrad, and as I move into a teaching profession, I naturally see myself curating in kind of the same way as my undergrad. But now I see how important it is to properly curate information for my future classroom. The topic of hoarding or dumping came up and my thoughts were “uh oh, what one am I?” I am happy I now know the difference between being a hoarder, scrooge, tabloid and robot and how to avoid falling into those categories. 

When deciding what tool to look at during class time, I decided to look at Notion. I consider myself a lover of organization, I like to have my to-do lists, and notes all in order. However, I was skeptical of using an online platform for this because I am a big paper and pen gal. With that being said, I still decided to give it a whirl, and all it gave me was a sense of being overwhelmed. I took my time to explore the platform and try and get the hang of it, and after a while I started to feel less overwhelmed, but in conclusion, I am going to stick to my handy ol tool of pen and paper.

Photo by Rawpixel licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This isn’t to say I didn’t like the platform, I found some aspects pretty cool and I am sure if I stuck with it and explored it even more I would end up liking it. I do like that it felt very organized and had lots of headers to easily navigate the platform. I also like that you can collaborate with peers, and that AI is built into it which becomes a helpful tool in this ever changing world. So that was my experience with curation tools, and although I will opt out of using them right now, I can definitely see myself using them in the future.  I am curious if my fellow readers and classmates feel like they prefer paper and pen, or if exploring these different curation tools made them feel more organized and able to properly curate content, let me know in the comments below!  

Before I end this blog, I had one more part of this class that stood out to me, and it was during our guest speaker Joseph Gamble. A fellow classmate asked Mr. Gamble if there were any tools to help students learn French, as most teaching programs these days don’t offer teacher candidates French. Because of this most of us don’t feel confident with teaching the subject (when I say most I mean me). Mr.Gamble gave a good suggestion of using the platform Antidote which corrects your grammar, and allows you to work independently in French. I decided to explore this platform on my own and I liked what I saw. It seems like it could help lots of students as it has lots of tools in it to help promote learning French. I liked that students could listen to French being spoken because that is a super important aspect when trying to learn the language. 

Alright folks that’s all, have a wonderful week, until next time!