5 Reasons you need to be a Content Curator

No doubt about it, Content Curation is one of the most important digital skills of our time. The basic fact is that Curation is a strategy that we need just to begin to implement and sift through all of the information online.The following explains the top reasons why we need to engage in quality content curation as educators and as learners!

Content Curation and Information Literacy

The Top 5 Reasons to be a Content Curator.

1. We have the technology. The technology that we have available to us has truly enabled us all to become content curators – students and educators alike. In fact, because there is so much new content being added to the web each and everyday, we simply do not have a choice but to use the technology to be curators.

2. We need help sifting through the deluges of Information

We need to be curators to manage the deluge of information on the internet. With ever increasing digital information that grows exponentially every second, makes it even more challenging to find the resources we need. We desperately need for teachers and students to learn effective curation skills to separate the wheat from the chaff. Sending our students out to find information from the unfiltered internet is just not a viable option anymore.

3. We need a plan to use and apply information

Content curation is more than just social media and keeping tabs of friends and trends. We do find a great deal of information on social media, but it doesn’t tell us what to do with that information. It doesn’t tell us what information is right or what is useful. It is how we integrate that information with our own experiences and critcally think about it that turns it into something useful. Curation helps us with our information plans.

4. Consumption and Creation

Creating content on the internet is at an all time high. We need to curate to organize and store the created content that we have done, or that others have done that is important to us in our practice. Find the information, add your own value to it, and share your curations with others to inspire! The SAMR is a great way to think about planning your creations!

5. It is a Natural Extension to Inquiry Based Learning

We ask our questions, we research, and we make connections that had never existed before. To move on from our original questions, we need to use our questions to begin the process of curation. We need to be aware of what we already know and where we need to go in order to organize the sources we will need and where we will seek our answers.

Regardless of the curation tool we ultimately use, the core skills remain the same. Check out more information on my powerpoint presentation.

Content Curation and Information Literacy

Deborah McCallum

c 2015