The Internet usually looks like a mare magnum for young students. So many things, so less time... They end up wasting their energy looking for resources, being absorbed in social sites or playing silly games. The solution? Make them curate their own PLE.

Personal Learning Environment , that’s what PLE stands for. And the process of building one is called curation . Everyone has ever done something like this, in fact bookmarking interesting websites for any kind of personal growth is to curate, and that especial folder you keep with several useful links for your work is a sort of a PLE.

Nowadays there are many tools to fabricate a PLE, but if you are going to choose one be sure that it is social media friendly , i.e, that you can share and find others’ works in the Net. I used to use Delicious , but I didn’t find it student-friendly enough, so I decided to change it for Symbaloo . This last one’s main advantage is its ease of use and its board -like interface.

As PLEs deal with many different things ( presentations, social networking, documentaries and videos, research, production, publication, citation, collaboration, storage, project management, coding, augmented reality, virtual worlds, gamification, gamecodization ...) you can also curate different boards according to the subject you are working about.

Let’s see an example . This is a board I use to teach the concept of PLE to my 13-year-old students. Everything is mixed but visually arranged. As it’s obvious there are hundreds of applications and this is but a mere mini collection.

There are some points to bear in mind about a PLE: