Sharing what you find with others... part 1

The internet has grown to include a plethora of sites to curate materials.  I have experimented with a few and have found some of them so easy to use that I am hooked.  I am a busy person.  I teach classes daily, I run a media center, I help with tech, sometimes, I don't have the time to read the links I find and share them with others.  To handle this, I started curating newspapers that self-build daily. Yes, they self-build daily. All I do is tweet the paper link (some are do it yourself!) and people do the rest. Life couldn't be simpler.  I do curate at a few places.  I am new to doing it, but I think with all of the tech things people ask me about, I need something to do.

First of all, I tried tweetedtimes.com.  I was doing a webinar recently and the presenter talked about using it to curate so I checked it out. It is easy.  It looks through your tweets, your friends and your favorites and assembles a paper based on what is there.  It then tweets it daily at a time you specify.  It also pulls the top stories from your friends and tweets it.  You can open each paper daily and peruse articles for later reference.  It curates quickly and assembles a vast array of information right at your fingertips.  Talk about a simple way to share information with people.

Secondly, I like to use paper.li as a newspaper builder.  I select the topics to search for and it assembles a paper daily with the specifics.  Example:  I could type in ipads, 1:1, etc and it will build a paper with articles around the web with those topics.  You can set it to tweet daily and you receive an email when the paper is complete so you can see what is coming.  I love it.

Something awesome about these curating sites is the fact that you can use them in your classroom.  They don't just have to be for your PLN, they can be for students. You can pull topics that you are covering in class and assemble real time papers about them.  Since you can choose news media, you can have students reading authentic materials in class. It's a great way to meet some of the common core standards we are all facing.

There are other ways to curate, we'll talk about the visual ones in the next post.