Another of the apps I have recently started making us of is www.paper.li which allows you to produce an online newspaper using curated content from social media.
I am currently making us of Paper to curate content tagged as #edtech in the hope that this will help me plus may help others. By gathering all the related content together and then adding specific additional resources which I have myself found I can create what should be both a useful and informative resource.
From a classroom teachers point of view this could be equally useful in collating resources together for students then to access. The teacher could therefore curate together all the resources relating to an event, location or subject which students are studying. The classroom teacher, as an alternative, could have the students doing the curating with the students then evaluating each other’s resultant Paper.
Where the teacher has done the curation it may be up to the students to examine the content to develop a viewpoint based on the varied and possibly conflicting viewpoints of the content which has been gathered.
I also see excellent opportunities where the teacher may be making use of social media such as twitter as a back channel within lessons. Paper would allow the teacher to curate all the content produced during a lesson or series of lessons into a single paper. Added to this the teacher could also include an external resources which may be appropriate to the topic or subject being studied. The resultant Paper would be an excellent revision tool as well as evidencing both the learning and some of the processes the students went through during their learning journey.
The idea of a newspaper very much interests me and it is the format of a newspaper which is a particular feature that I find interesting in Paper. It gives the resultant product a purpose in that the Paper is designed to be consumed by its readership. This therefore provides the activity of creating a Paper some validity and purpose which should help in engaging students.
At this point I don’t have a massive amount of experience using curation tools like paper.li so I cannot really compare it to the likes of Storify. Based on my limited experience of paper though I can see some possibilities in how it might be used.
Technology and Learning 