There are countless great resources available on the web. These resources can be readily used in your courses. The problem for many is how to curate, organize, and share them. Let me share two options that I use.

I have observed a number of faculty save favorite links to their web browser favorites. The problem with this strategy is that over time it bogs down the browser, and it is hard to access these links when you are not on your computer.

Social bookmarking tools can assist you with curating, organizing, and sharing links with others. When you build a course, you are actually curating, organizing, and sharing content. Building out courses on a learning management system such as Blackboard can get unwieldy if you add one link at a time. With a social bookmarking tool, you can organize a set of links and provide one link directly to that set of links. The nice thing is that when you add a link to your set, your students will automatically have access to it. Thus, you are only doing one thing with many results.

Recommended Tools

My recommended tools of choice are Diigo and Pinterest. Each of these tools allows you to curate, organize, and share content. Additionally, you can create collaborative sets where students can contribute to the curation.

Diigo

Diigo is a social bookmarking tool. While you are scouring the web for great content to use in your course, you simply click a button on your browser to save the resource to your collection. You can organize it through the use of tags. A tag is a keyword used to help organize the content.

A tag is a keyword used to help organize the content. Examples of tags could include discipline-specific keywords, course numbers, or other appropriate taxonomy. You can tag a resource with multiple tags.

Another nice feature of Diigo is the ability to add a description to your resource. This is useful for explaining why you chose a specific site.

With one link I can share countless curated resources with others. Here are some examples of my curations:

• ITEC 4030 – A class I taught
• Flipped Instruction
• Problem-based Learning
• Blogging in Education
• Gamification
• Open Educational Resources

Any time I add a link to Diigo with a tag, individuals with access to the tag will have access to the new resource I added.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual curation site that can be used to curate, organize, and share resources for your class.

Basically, you pin resources you find interesting and useful to a board. It is very similar to sharing documents by pinning them to a board outside your office.

Ideally, you would create a board focusing on a specific topic. It could be a specific topic in your discipline, or it could be for your class name. It is entirely up to you.

To make pinning easy, you should install the pinning tool on your web browser toolbar.

Here are some examples of boards I have created:

• Pinterest in the Classroom
• ITEC 5010 – Required Textbooks
• ITEC 5010 – Useful Resources
• ITEC 5010 – Tutorials
• ITEC 5010 – Discussion Resources
• CAP Aerospace Education Resources
• Books on education, learning, and teaching

As you can see, with one link I can share quite a number of resources. All I have to do is continue to add to the sets.

If you want to know more about these technologies and ideas, please contact a member of the TEI team.

Additional Resources

• Diigo – Social Bookmarking
• Pinterest

Additional Reading

• Use Diigo to Support Your Class

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash