Coffee Break with Emily: Collect & Curate Incredible Content

Thinglink Summer Challenge #2: 

Collect & Curate Incredible Content

For the 2nd Thinglink Challenge, I shared the Solar System Task Library for Teachers. A task library is a place to collect all of your multi-media resources related to a particular unit. You'll find videos, lesson plans, blog posts, pictures, articles and more on this Thinglink! Now, you can collect and organize resources like this to your own Thinglink channel. If you create a channel called "Earth Science," for example, you can post Thinglinks from yourself and others to curate your own collection for that topic.

Put your cursor over the image and click the hot spots to see the multi-media resources that are linked. 

Thinglink has become my favorite place to organize resources for a unit. By using the little hot spots, I can add a lot of multi media stuff without it becoming a mess. I have a large online PLN, and I often come across great resources randomly–not just when I am sitting down to plan. I might see a tweet on my phone with a great lesson idea, or come across the perfect video for a lesson on youtube when I'm playing Peg + Cat for my son. Then, when I am ready to sit down and plan for a unit, I spend a long time trying to find that lesson idea or video because I can't remember where I saw it! Even if I did manage to save it at the time, it' makes me feel scattered to have so many resources in so many different places! Thinglink gives me easy access whenever I want to add more resources or find the one I have already saved. 

I will be teaching technology K-5 in a new district this year, so I decided to use Thinglink to organize myself as I start planning (I start back this week!). I'm curating a collection based on the standards. Since the CCSS build on each other, I wanted to build a continuum across grade levels by keeping all my lessons and resources for a standard K - 5 in one place. This backward planning bank would also be helpful to classroom teachers because often times the resources we find are great for more than one grade level. It would be nice for any teacher to see how a standard builds and grows from year to year.

This is the standard I will focus on at the beginning of the year, but I will be adding more pages to a channel called "Backward Planning." The best part is that we can do it together! I changed the setting on the Thinglink below so that you can add to it too! Whether you are a tech teacher, a classroom teacher, or an RTI interventionist, collaborating like this helps us align our teaching for students, and it cuts the work load in 1/2 when we share resources! Together we can build some great lessons that integrate technology. Please leave a comment and let me know if you add something to this Thinglink!