Curating Content Part 1 – Bookmarks

First a word about curation and why it’s so important. All teachers should have a good understanding of curation of content such as lesson plans, emails, videos, pictures, music and our documents and files. We are exposed to so much media in the average day and unless we apply some organization to it, many valuable resources are lost and forgotten. This series of tech tips articles will look at how we can become better content curators.

Bookmarks, Favorites call them what you will, we all use them every day to try and make finding things easier in the future. Hiding at the top of your browser window is the browser bookmarks bar which can be used and transformed into a digital bookmark curation center.

Julianne Lange shared how to save bookmarks in a January 2018 tech tips article. We will build on this showing you how to bring order to your bookmarks. Julianne shared how you can edit your bookmarks and display only the icon in the bookmarks bar or a small amount of text like my drive icon shown below.

Julianne also showed how to make folders in the bookmarks bar and that is what I want to expand on for this article.

If you divide the things that you do each day into categories what would they be? Teachers might have folders such as LPDC, OTES, Homework Helpers or VR Sites. Many teachers use videos and music every day in their class. Every video, song, google doc or website has a URL that you can save in a folder.

As supervisor of a department, I regularly have to access many google sheets and forms to administer events and facilitate trainings. I have tried several ways of organizing these documents. You can star a document or put it in a folder and if all else fails you can search for it.

My latest solution is to make folders for each of these documents to give me one-click access from my browser bar. You can even have folders within folders which work like drop-down menus.

Here is my Training folder which has links I use when working on NWOCA Training events. You can see next to that is an Admin folder, with links to the HR Kiosk, Timesheets etc.

One idea that I picked up at a conference recently was to store bookmarks in a To Read Later folder.

So where do you start? I suggest the sites that you use every day. Put them in the top left of your bookmarks bar as icons. Next, make folders for the things you access weekly and put them in the bookmarks bar to the right of the icons.

Finally look at bookmarks that you have not used in the last month. Are they still valid? Remove bookmarks to make room for the fresher content. Right-click and choose Delete.

Last a word about moving bookmarks. Click on a bookmark icon and you can drag it into folders, between folders or to a different place in the bookmarks bar. To get really serious you can open the bookmark manager by right-clicking anywhere in the bookmarks bar and choosing Bookmark Manager. Use the traffic light menu to sort, add folders and get help.

Hopefully these tips will help you to become more efficient with bookmarking and you will spend less time searching and more time being productive. In the next article we will look at how to curate the content in your google drive.

John Mansel-Pleydell

Google Certified Trainer