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.
E To fully develop and comprehend this teaching issue,
it’s advisable to research and expand these areas:
1
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Bookmarking options online
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2
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Web 2.0 tools for communities of
learning
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3
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How to use Scoop.it!
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4
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Topic searches in Scoop.it!
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5
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How to curate a topic
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Professor
Jonathan
Acuña-Solano
ELT
Instructor & Trainer based in Costa Rica
Freelance ELT Consultant four OUP in
Central America
For
further comments or suggestions, reach me at:
@jonacuso –
Twitter
Other blogs and sites I often write for my students at
the university are:
Get new ELT material and ideas by visiting my curated topics on http://paper.li/ and http://scoop.it/
Published on September 19, 2013
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Get a copy of "Scoop.it! a Free Online Link-Sharing Service by Jonathan Acuña" over here.
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