Skip to main content

Jennifer Gonzalez- Cult of Pedagogy: Are you a Curator or a Dumper? February 5, 2018

Jennifer's post this week is extremely helpful to those of us using technology to communicate ideas, especially if we are blogging.  This week Jennifer discusses the difference between being a Curator and being a Dumper.  There is so much information that we have access to, that we can share with other educators, but we must be careful that we are not simply "dumping" information on them.  

"Dumping" information on others is actually bad for your brain as "cognitive load theory suggests that the brain can only take in so much at once."  If you simply dump information on someone, their brain can actually begin to shut down and they cannot process anything you have shared with them at all.  Instead of dumping, Jennifer suggests that we should be curators as educators.  To be a curator, we must organize information and only choose a few key points to share and arrange those points in a presentable order.  This allows our brains to sort and take in the information appropriately.  She related being a curator to the way that museums present information.  Museums allow us to see items grouped under specific themes and give us time to process information and identify how items relate together under one large idea or concept.  

Jennifer discussed ways to be a Curator instead of a Dumper in education to improve the classroom.  A few suggestions that she had that I took away with me are:
  • Student Directed Learning: When allowing students to search for information, limit the resources that they have.  If students have access to too many resources this can put their brain on overload and leads to dumping. We should curate the student choices.
  • Communication with Parents: When we communicate with parents, we must curate the information we share.  If we send them all the information, we dump on them.  When we select a few highlights to share we actually allow them to take the information in better and to process what is happening inside our classrooms. 
  • Sharing Research: If presenting information to other educators, we should curate the information and only present the best highlights of the information and narrow our focus.  By doing this we curate the information instead of dump it.
This article has so much great information, it really should be read by all educators! I am going to try to be more intentional about curating, especially with my students and communicating with my parents.  I'm curious to hear anyone's thoughts on this. 

Comments

  1. UnknownFebruary 11, 2018 at 6:17 AM

    I have used that research strategy with my children before. I inserted the webpages into a Nearpod or Pear Deck and allowed them to search the websites I proved to gather their information. This seems to make the process go smoother.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jennifer Gonzalez- Cult of Pedagogy: Updating Your Classroom Design- March 27, 2018

Recently, Jennifer Gonzalez created a blog post about upgrading your classroom design.  We often see classrooms that look cozy and modern, allowing students to collaborate and feel at home, yet many teachers believe that it is impossible to make their own classroom this way within budget constraints and small spaces.  Jennifer interviewed Bob Dillon to gather 12 things that teachers can do to make their classrooms more student friendly and a better place for learning. 1) Ask students throughout the year "What in this room supports your learning and what gets in the way?" 2) Take things out: if you remove items and you don't miss them then you don't need them in your classroom. 3) Mix up Student Seating: try different arrangements or allow students choice in where they sit. 4) Take notice of the perimeter: Are the walls distracting or do they add to learning? Do certain posters need taken down? 5) Reduce or Eliminate Teacher Workspace: Allow students more...
1 comment
Read more

My Technology Use: February 4, 2018: Smart Notebook

I often use Smart Notebook in my classroom, but I will be the first to admit it is often used to post an agenda or as an extra whiteboard in the classroom to call students up to work out problems.  My students have always loved getting to write on the Smart Board.  This week, I needed to teach elapsed time and to be honest, I was really struggling with introducing it.  I wanted an interactive lesson, which kept seeming to be impossible as our school only had a total of 10 mini clocks for the students to work with in a hands-on manner at their desks.  I remembered Smart Notebook and was able to create a lesson using it that I was really proud of and my students loved! I searched for a clock and found one under "interactive and multimedia."  This clock allowed us to move the minute and hour hand to review how to use a clock to tell time.  I was then able to put two clocks side by side and call on students to set each clock to a different time, so that we cou...
1 comment
Read more

My Technology Use: February 19, 2018: Conversion Examples

This week, I didn't try anything fancy in my classroom with technology, but instead had a spur of the moment opportunity to utilize technology to further my students' understanding.  We are working on converting units of measure.  It is my first year teaching fourth grade math, and when asking a coworker (who taught math previously in fourth grade) what background knowledge students usually come with as far as measurement goes, she said in the past they had a basic idea of what each unit of measure was.  This year, of course, was not the case at all.  My students picked up on feet and inches, but kilograms, grams, meters, millimeters, etc. were all very foreign words to them.  I quickly realized that there was no discussion that was going to help them understand, so I turned to technology for help. We went through each unit of measure individually and because it was spur of the moment, I only thought to Google each unit of measure and show real-life examples of...
1 comment
Read more