Scoop.it! A Free Online Link-Sharing Service

Hybrid and Blended Learning, Online Instruction, online learning, Online Teaching Practices, Scoop.it!, Tech Tip, Web Tools 0 comments

Scoop.it! A Free Online Link-Sharing Service

How current should our understanding of the tools available to us as an online / blended learning instructor be? Is it crucial to stay up to date with these web enhancements to be a more effective professional? As we have to keep current with the latest developments in our content areas, professional-wise it is mandatory to know what new tools are emerging and how they can be used to help our students learn and achieve course learning goals. Let’s review http://www.scoop.it to create a curated topic directly linked with students’ favorite social media and to gather information for courses, about their community of practice, or to keep current with new trends in their fields.

What’s Scoop.it!? Scoop.it! was built and launched to the public in November 2011 to enable professionals “to share important ideas with the right audiences giving them an opportunity to create and maintain meaningful Web presence” [Scoop.it! Company Manifesto]. This Web presence can be translated for educational purposes into a sort of bookmarking service where the “curator” [user] can visually see what s/he is adding to its page content and share its content with peers via Facebook or Twitter, or by simply sending his curated topic web address. To sum up, this tool is some sort of link-sharing service connected to the social media working as a storage where topic-related links can be added by its curator/user and shared with peers or the world.

How can Scoop.it! be used for educational purposes? This Web 2.0 tool can be used either by faculty or students. Oftentimes professors and learners have a collection of Websites and pages that they find helpful for their courses or for their professional practice. But if these sites and pages are not stored properly, teachers and pupils are bound to lose track of them. Sometimes, people store these links in their favorites on their computers, but if they are not at home, they won’t have direct access to them for they are not stored on the cloud. Scoop.it! will allow the user/curator to have access to his/her links visibly, with a picture depicting the link’s content, and with the chance to include a brief description of its content [see picture above]. Other tool users can also leave a comment on other curators’ links, or, if they prefer, they can re-scoop the link and make it part of their collections. Additionally, with the search interests … option on the page, the curator can also browse the content of all topics and find information another user has included in his/her topic.

If wondering how this Web tool can be used in one’s course or courses, let’s review some simple and practical uses:

1. To have students create their own curated topic to store links for research papers, presentations, homework, and the like

2. To share their curated links with their community of learning in class via the course wiki

3. To browse information on their specific professional field within local or international communities of practice

4. To keep current with new developments in one’s professional field by using the RSS option that tool offers

5. To get the latest links submissions by other curators on one’s curated topic via the suggestions provided by the tool system

As a conclusion, Scoop.it! is a great tool to keep current and to keep track of communities of practice. It can become a great link storage place to have information just one click away and on the cloud.