Brian Aspinall (@mraspinall on Twitter) tossed out a Twitter message last night inviting people to check out Kurrate – a new curation tool for teachers using video in the classroom.
I had to check it out immediately. First, you’ve got to be interested in what an Ontario educator shares and secondly, I know that so many teachers are effectively and increasingly using videos as key in their lessons.
So, off I went.
I wasn’t expecting to see what I found. It was actually in a directory off the root of Brian’s website. It was another one of his projects released to the wild. Now, if you go to YouTube or Vimeo, there is already search functionality in place. What makes Kurrate different?
He’s searching them all, or you can selectively choose the services that you want.
We had a little back and forth discussion. I think he’s done a very nice job putting this together. My only comment surrounded the embedded scroll bars. With a trackpad, I had hit the wrong scroll bar and had the wrong thing scrolling. The individual results are embedded inside a window of results. It seems, from our discussion, that he’s wondering the best way to handle the results as well. We both agree that popup windows should not be an option!
We talked about opening the results in different tabs and having each individual set of results in a window and buttons to step through the results. This seems like a puzzle to be solved. How do you best return the results?
In the meantime, this is a really well created and I think it will be well received by teachers or students looking for a search engine to give them all. Give it a try and see what you think. He’s actively looking for feedback through Twitter or he’s got an email address on the page. I’m sure that he’ll be appreciative of your thoughts.
doug --- off the record 