Many instructors in this program have recommended many wonderful resources to us that will be useful in our future classrooms, but I admit I have been having a hard time keeping track of everything. Over the past few months, I have come across several posts and websites that I know will be helpful later, but that I haven’t really known what to do with in the meantime. There are only so many browser bookmarks one can have before they become too many to keep track of, and I have frankly been too lazy to come up with a better way to organize these. Therefore, I was a bit relieved to see that Rich would being going over knowledge management and curation systems in class this week.

I have used both Evernote and Microsoft OneNote in the past – two of the systems that Rich Recommended – though only for notetaking, and not for content curation. However, I have been using Evernote less because their free version only allows limited devices, and I have not wanted to rely on OneNote because it requires my UVic account for the free version. For these reasons, I decided to try saving some posts into Google Keep, as I show in the video below. I was pleased to see how easy it is to use, and I find the layout quite user friendly. Unfortunately, there is not way to save PDF files into Google Keep (which I believe Evernote and Microsoft OneNote do allow). This is a significant drawback in my opinion. There are many PDFs that I wish I were able to save here, especially reading materials from the courses I’m taking, so I hope that eventually Google will implement this feature.

I think it is very important for teacher to set up some sort of content curation system early on in their careers, especially in the information and digital age we are living in. Not only because there are plenty of valuable lesson and classroom ideas online, but more importantly because it is our job as professionals to keep up to date in developments in our field, as is alluded to in the Professional Standards for BC Educators. It could be argued that by not keeping up with and implementing new strategies of quality in our classrooms, that we lapse in our professional responsibility, and it seems that have a well set-up knowledge management system to keep track of such strategies can help prevent this.

This sort of professional development is always important for educators to engage in, which was also the purpose of the EdCamp conducted this week. Because of this, I am quite disappointed that I missed these sessions. For any readers of this post who did attend the EDCI 336 EdCamp, what were your key takeaways? Were any resources discussed which you would recommend?