Sure, the Web is a key resource for educators, but what’s the best way to share the good stuff you’ve collected with students and teachers and keep it all organized?

EduClipper may be an answer. The free tool, launched this spring, seeks to provide a one-stop solution for K–12 by giving educators and students a simple, easy-to-use destination for curating and sharing online.

EduClipper was created by Adam Bellow, a former teacher and son of a high-school librarian who also works as a K–12 technology consultant. After hearing from educators who sought a visual content curation platform that was student friendly and school safe, Bellow set out to create a solution.

After last year’s testing period, eduClipper launched to the public in May and is now used in more than 450 classrooms. Brad Currie, middle school vice principal and supervisor of instruction for the Chester (NJ) School District, uses eduClipper with the 150 educators in his district as a professional development resource. Jason Fisher, a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher at Riddells Creek Primary School in Victoria, Australia, shares it with his students as a collaborative research tool. Both sing eduClipper’s praises. “Staff members find eduClipper to be a great one-stop resource with huge potential in terms of their own professional development and promoting student collaboration,” says Currie. Fisher particularly likes that his students can comment on their sources in a description area provided within eduClipper.

EduClipper is tailor-made for K–12. Teachers and administrators can create accounts for students as young as five with varying levels of permissions. Do you want your students to interact only with content from your classroom? No problem. Do you prefer a curation tool that doesn’t allow comments? That’s doable, too. EduClipper offers a walled-garden approach that schools can adjust to fit their needs, instead of simply providing the private-world binary that’s all too familiar in online platforms.

Using eduClipper is simple, especially for those already familiar with online curation tools like Pinterest. Content can be “clipped” either through the eduClipper site or by using the bookmarklet tool in the browser. In addition to making it easy to clip links and images, the site also lets you grab video, documents, and embed code from creation tools on the Web bookmarklet—a great way to integrate student work from Google Drive.

While you can discover other eduClips and reClip them (this is similar to retweeting on Twitter or repinning on Pinterest), the site also offers collaborative clipboards where groups can add items to a shared space. These features are great, but the innovation that educators might appreciate most is one that generates formatted citations for online content. I hope that this will make that ever-helpful student citation, “it came from Google,” a thing of the past.

During our testing period, we ran into a few bugs that made our experience of browsing and clipping content less than seamless. When we brought up these problems with an eduClipper representative, we were told that the organization was aware of these issues and that fixes were currently in the works.

It’s tempting to compare the user experience of eduClipper with Pinterest or Pocket, a popular content-saving application. But those platforms are further along, so it’s an unfair comparison to make at this time. We’re looking forward to seeing eduClipper develop and work out its bugs, since the platform truly addresses a gap for K–12 students and educators.

Bellow says, “I think that teachers will find it a great way to connect to, build, or strengthen a personal learning network where they can curate with like-minded educators and find awesome content that they can use in their classroom or share with their students.”

EduClipper is free, available globally for K–12, and supports IE8+, Safari 3+, Firefox 4+, and Chrome. A mobile app version is in the works, though a launch date has not been set.

The Pivot: Digital Learning Resources

At a recent CoSN (Consortium for School Networking) Conference, I participated in several discussions with content and educational service providers, not to mention district leaders. To my surprise, they don’t think much of textbooks either. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has all but declared war on textbooks, advocating a rapid shift to digital resources to better support student learning. The demise of print textbooks may well be more sudden and ignominious than the fall of disco in the late 1970s. Was that guy wearing a “Textbooks Suck” T-shirt?

As traditional publishers rush into the digital marketplace, Washington State has adopted a K–12 open educational resources (OER) initiative. Similar to programs around the nation, the goal is to provide free or low-cost learning resources to schools. While not strictly digital, OER is intended to support 21st-century models, including online learning and 1:1. In turn, Apple is actively promoting iBook authoring tools for teachers (and students) to create or remix OER content for custom textbooks. The digital shift is underway. There are many ways that teacher librarians can inform and assist districts making the transition.

The Points

Curation. Despite appearing on several year-end “Do Not Use Anymore” word lists, the term “curation” was used with impunity at the conference. From sales pitches to conversations with superintendents and technology directors, the need to locate, collect, and manage digital content was consistent and clear. Semantics aside, teacher librarians know curation. For decades, they have been curating both analog and digital content. As districts look to digital resources, teacher librarians can repackage their skills in collection development and learning-resource management to provide sorely needed leadership, particularly with curriculum departments. Few curriculum departments have the staffing or expertise to understand the challenges of digital content and OER or how to effectively implement a digital content strategy. While some companies offer digital content curation, many districts will opt to do the work themselves due to cost or the desire to retain control. Enter teacher librarians to the rescue.

Metadata. Curation is not just about finding and selecting content. Like library materials, digital resources require organization and classification so that users can locate them. Pivoting from Dewey and Sears, teacher librarians can learn some new concepts. Another key term is metadata, the tags and descriptors that, like subject headings, provide categorization of and subsequent access to digital learning resources. Metadata is everywhere. Because teacher librarians understand controlled vocabularies, subject headings, and the limitations of keyword searching, they can help districts create guidelines and systems that will guarantee a successful digital shift.

Learning objects. As ebooks have complicated the library universe, learning objects will vex classrooms and curriculum departments. Learning objects include a diverse array of instructional materials that can be used as schools begin to leverage digital content—handouts, slide stacks, lesson plans, interactive texts, audio and video files, animations, and games. The same order applied to library catalogs will necessarily have to be applied to learning objects both within and among districts and states. LORs, or learning object repositories, will house these curated collections and will be available to students and teachers not in a sticky textbook, but on an iPad or laptop. And who will likely collect, inventory, and circulate those devices?

Just ask Sisyphus.

Mark Ray (Mark.Ray@vansd.org) is the manager of instructional technology and library services at the Vancouver (WA) Public Schools.