Tweeted Times
Paper.li
Scoop.It Engineering Materials
Scoop.It Classroom Resources
Scoop.It My account
I do like my paper.li paper from CI 484, when I started it was ok but not great. Now, I am finding more content and like the format of my paper.li paper. However, I really like Scoop.it much more! Considering the alternative of curation is RSS feeds like google reader, it was love at first sight for curation and I. Once I started curation, I never considered the option of just a feed again.
I really like how both Paper.li and Scoop.it will email you the "updated" paper. The set up of paper.li is a little more like a traditional newspaper with the headings to categorize your feeds. I do feel like this is one of the best qualities that paper.li offers!
I am starting to understand how scoop.it works and functions, now I am beginning to think I would like to introduce my paper to my students. I don't want to ask my students to curate, I just want my curation to be a "resource". Using my paper would be a guided google search for my students. If I put pages in for a web quest, approved sites for research, or help sites my students can use the paper instead of being bogged down by a google search.
I had a hard time getting my scoop.it to get my RSS feeds, but once I figured it out….it's easy! So for those of you who are using scoop.it…..click on your paper, then manage, manage sources, advanced. This lets you add any RSS feed, any single twitter person or a twitter list. This was neat! I was a little frustrated because scoop.it didn't have any help on this, so I started clicking around (and secretly hoping I didn't kill my paper).
As I am experiencing more with both curation options, I am still very hesitant to bring this into my classroom! As I was working on my paper, I found a topic that was entirely inappropriate. It didn't fit any of my content, but somehow was put in based on someone who I follow on twitter. I not only removed the person from twitter, but then had to remove the content from my curations. However, I do think I have more control in scoop.it than paper.li. This incident happened in paper.li, but wasn't easy to get rid of the article. When I use scoop.it, it contains articles and websites that I "scoop" with the icon in my web browser. It also brings in articles and content based on other papers I subscribe to. If you have content that you want removed it is much easier to remove through scoop.it. I will not be asking or introducing my students to their own curation pages until I have full control of their dashboards. I can't control who my students are linked to, following, or receiving posts from. If one student gets the wrong piece of information, that means I expose my entire school!
I think scoop it is the only curation tool I am ready to bring into my classroom. I can make as many papers as I want, so if I want to create a paper for robotics I can have that. I am currently creating a paper for a presentation at a training for my program focusing on the importance of e-portfolios in my classroom. Right now, this is a collection of articles and websites I find to support my topic. I see this as an option for my classroom since I can have a paper for STEM education, robotics, flight and space, motion and physics, chemistry, etc. I can basically create my own source pages for my students to use as research or suggestions to guide them. I plan on starting I my trial with my 8th graders in Robotics in January. If they can handle it, then I will continue with the rest of the topics and courses.
My previous post on curation:
I am not sure that I like either of the two sources for curation. I think the concept is awesome; I like the idea of things coming in and being organized before you even have to worry about how many new posts there are. We all know the scene, the kids are gone, staff has stopped coming by to chat and plan, you open your email and there are 40+ messages. Your heart just sinks! Same thing when I open the feed reader. The idea of not having that overwhelming number of items show up in your email or reader is really nice. I think if I had 2 more hours in my day I could commit to reading weekly. The curation tool at least makes it an option to read all my feeds!
Curations like Tweeted Times and Paper.li narrow your sights into the topics that you really want to see and picks up on the tags that you request. I think using a curation tool would be helpful for me because it limits the number of items coming in and allows me to focus on the ones I really want to see. I really liked being able to pick the people or the items that are similar to my interests.
I don’t know that I would be brave enough to do this with my students yet, the main reason being that I don’t know how to monitor what is coming in to all their accounts. From a teaching perspective this is a big disadvantage not being able to control anything with the students. They could be following people on twitter or Facebook who post comments that are not at all appropriate for school. I also can’t control if there is someone posting good content with a connection to someone who is not, then my students have access to the appropriate and inappropriate content. Even with my good kids I would need to worry that their connections are good connections with appropriate material all the time. I have to worry about the kids who don’t follow directions and end up with inappropriate content.then share that with the rest of the class since they would all be connected followers. Until I can go in, edit, control, and view all student dashboards I do not see this as something I can use with middle school students. They are so smart and creative with ways to get around the rules, I don't want to put myself in that situation.
I think there are other disadvantages depending on the curation tool you use, I didn’t have much luck with paper.li gathering my feed information. That didn’t help me get any new information or organize what I did have. Tweeted Times was slightly overwhelming visually; everything felt like it was just blobbed together. While the information was what I asked Tweeted Times to gather, it still wasn’t organized by person or topic. This left me feeling like I was having all of my good information dumped on me, just a little bit more organized when it was dumped compared to the RSS feed.
I liked in Paper.li the option to bring in only certain feeds I had subscribed to, choose certain keywords, or to just bring in tweets from one person you are following or everyone associated to your account. I felt like this gave me more of an option in controlling what I wanted to see and when. Between the two curation tools I would say Tweeted Times worked better only because paper.li didn’t grab any of my information. I assume part of the issue was some of my RSS feeds are not updating very often, but that doesn't explain my twitter connections. It didn’t grab any information from the last 24 hours. I even had a few feeds from this morning that it didn’t recognize as new. I am not sure what setting needs to be adjusted but I know that isn’t right.
I don’t feel like either one of them really did much for me. I have never used any type of curation device so I had no reference point, but I was really disappointed. Then I tried scoop.it. I love scoop.it. It has a ton of cool features that I thought the other two would be offering. Scoop.it makes a tool in the toolbar that lets me link any website that comes across my browser to my “paper”. I also like the fact that you can find other papers you like and follow them. I don’t have to keep subscribing to feeds that I only get one or two good things a year. I found some people who had the same types of articles and feeds that I did so I can just follow their feeds instead.
I think I would much rather use a curation tool rather than an RSS feed due to the way it filters my information. I really appreciate the way it organizes and offers me information relevant to me. The RSS feed was really overwhelming since everything was just dumped in my folders. I can’t even say that I would consider going back to the RSS feed when I have an option like this.
