30-Day Blogging Challenge: Day 20: Collaborative Curator and Student Curation

Day 20: How do you curate student work - or help them do it themselves?

I see myself as a Collaborative Curator in the teams I work with. I help students to curate the huge amounts of resources available to them and help provide them with strategies, tools and resources to enhance their learning.

In terms of curating student creations, I am still working on that. I do a number of things: we post our work around the classroom, in the hallways, on our class blog, on Twitter and we organize it in our "Book Apartments" (I hate desks, so students always work at tables, but that means they lose desk storage space. I have wooden shelves for them to keep their notebooks, duotangs and work, a few years ago, the students named them "Book Apartments". The name stuck), we put work together in collaborative books (Class Glossary, an atlas of imaginary places, poetry collections), we organize our work on the Google Drive, and each individual student selects examples of his or her work to showcase in SLCs (Student Led Conferences).

I would like students to take more, regular ownership over curating their work. I really liked using "Proof Cards" in the final SLC of the year last year and found that, after a year of modelling how to curate work, reflect on our learning and celebrate the process of learning (not just the product), students effectively used them. They selected work that showcased all stages of their learning and that proved what they had learned. They curated work in their Work Apartments and talked about their ongoing learning.

I hope to incorporate blogs into my teaching this year. Several years ago, I helped four classes students curate and distribute their work through individual History blogs. This was terrific for them and for me and I am considering ways to make this work with my grade 3/4s this year.