Curating Information
I've looked at a few of the tools suggested and I think the one that I personally find the most useful is Symbaloo ( www.symballo.com ) . I am going to play with this as a way to share information with my students. Although, to be honest, I would hesitate to require kids to use any of the tools presented. My reasons are two-fold. First, is that I feel that people organize themselves in different ways and trying to impose a tool on someone sometimes stifles their organization more than helps it. As teachers I am sure we have all been in classes or in-services in which a particular tool is being touted (or imposed) and the tool does not fit your organizational style.
The second reason that I hesitate to impose a tool on the kids it that all of these sights seem to have the same financial model of trying to collect information on the users that can be used to market to those users. I feel like we already give up way to much information to entities that are using this information for their own gain, and I want to teach my students to be a little more wary of the motives behind all the "free" stuff on the internet.
All that being said, I MIGHT be willing to show some of these options to my kids for them to explore on their own and give them the option of which tools (if any) to use to curate their information. I doubt seriously that I would require the use of one of these over the simple option of a URL list in their bibliography. BUT if I had students who wanted to use one of these tools in the place of a bibliography, I would likely be okay with that as well (as long as the teaching of the bibliography is not the point of the lesson).
The second reason that I hesitate to impose a tool on the kids it that all of these sights seem to have the same financial model of trying to collect information on the users that can be used to market to those users. I feel like we already give up way to much information to entities that are using this information for their own gain, and I want to teach my students to be a little more wary of the motives behind all the "free" stuff on the internet.
All that being said, I MIGHT be willing to show some of these options to my kids for them to explore on their own and give them the option of which tools (if any) to use to curate their information. I doubt seriously that I would require the use of one of these over the simple option of a URL list in their bibliography. BUT if I had students who wanted to use one of these tools in the place of a bibliography, I would likely be okay with that as well (as long as the teaching of the bibliography is not the point of the lesson).
I never considered it from that point of view, that kids might be exposing too much information about themselves by using something like Symballo. I know about as much as my grandmother about current technology so I had to look up what Symballo even was. I had heard of it before and my colleagues seem to enjoy it but I've just never had a reason for something like this. I do like the idea of being able to create an almost "dashboard" of links for my students to use when conducting research. We are required to have our kids complete a rather large research project on a major disaster each year and I cringe every time we begin researching because students get sucked into the search and rarely come up with anything of value. If I could conduct a large search beforehand and narrow down the options a bit I could probably improve the quality of their projects.
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