Engaging Teacher Professional Development Through Digital Curation
Abstract: This study in progress explores the opportunities digital curation offers in digital, collaborative professional development contexts. Teachers and students are continuously bombarded with content material and communication through the Internet and social media and must find ways to aggregate, evaluate, and contextualize the information to effectively use and share with others. In this study in progress, pre-service teachers will be curating digital professional development resources through a variety of Web 2.0 services, all of which accentuate the capability to evaluate, contextualize, and share with others. Specifically, participants of the study will engage in five steps of curation to create their own learning resources: (a) consume and comprehend multiple forms of content on the Web; (b) aggregate content based on a specific purpose; (c) evaluate the content’s usefulness, timeliness, and credibility; (d) contextualize and repurpose the content appropriately; and (e) share the material and collaborate with the intended audience.