A Communication Tool
If you ever wanted a go-to source for sharing and reading
the latest online articles on your favorite topics, Scoop.it! might be your new
favorite Web2.0 tool. Scoop.it! is a
free, web-based tool that allows you to collect and share links to articles on
your topics of interest in an electronic magazine format. As the user, or ‘curator’ of your topics, you
link topic-related articles (scoops) to add to you topic page, creating posts.
The Scoop.it site can even do some of the work of finding scoops for you. As
curator, you can enter specific search terms, and Scoop.it will use GoogleNews,
Twitter, and other sites to find articles it suggests you may want to scoop for
your topic pages.
Scoop.it promotes a user community allowing curators to
follow other topic pages, add comments and ‘likes’ to other scoops, and ‘scoop’
articles from different topics pages to add to your own pages. Scoop.it! lets
you promote your own page by linking your topic pages to Facebook, Twitter, and
other social networks. Using the free-version, curators may work on up to 5
topic pages per monhts, with an unlimited number of posts per topic. Beyond
that, Scoop.it! charges a monthly service fee: $12.99/month for 10 topics. There
is even a business version if you want to really personalize your topics.
For educators, Scoop.it offers a discounted rate of
$6.99/month for 20 topics and allows up to 30 co-curators per topic, making it
a fairly education-friendly tool.
To get started using Scoop.it!, the site provides fairly
detailed information and many suggestions for creating a successful topic
page. First and foremost, you should
have a fairly specific topic idea in mind, for example, “education” is probably
too broad, whereas “Web2.0 tools for graduate medical education” really hones
in your interest area. The site promotes
a sense of being an area expert; however you really just need a strong interest
area and a knack for searching the internet.
When you create your topic pages, Scoop.it!
is very interactive, walking you right through it.
1. First,
you choose your topic:
2.
Then
you add a description to better describe your topic page and add in keywords so
Scoop.it! can provide scoop suggestions:
3. Next, you add a “Bookmarklet” to your browser so that you can “scoop” any webpage your are looking at:
4.
And
you’re ready to start scooping and curating your topic page:
6.
Once
you have your topic page up and running, exploring the pages of others becomes
even more engaging. You can search for other topics:
Choose others to follow:
Offer up commentary on posts and respond to your own
comments:
7.
When
you want to keep others updated on your latest posts or share you page,
Scoop.it! makes it easy to share through many social networking sites:
Creating a site was easy! You can see mine here:
Scoop.it! is a format that provides a user-friendly,
entertaining means to creating an online classroom. The magazine format provides an updated, more
interactive approach for providing online resources. An instructor can create
topic pages for their students, providing posts about subject matter, including
reading material and additional resources. By maintaining a separate assignment
blog, the instructor could scoop his own blog, providing postings with links
for assignments.
In addition to obtaining homework assignments and resources
from the Scoop.it! pages, students can complete assignments on their own topic
pages. By following each others’ posts, the students and instructors maintain
linkage to each other, allowing further discovery and sharing of new resources
from their peers. Making use of the
commentary features, students can converse, critique, and further share through
each others’ posts.
By using the education version of the site, with use of up
to 30 co-curators, group projects can readily be assigned. Students no longer
need to work solely within their own topic pages. Topic pages could be
collaborative efforts, and most dynamically, an entire class could manage a topic
page together.
Using this pyramidal approach, it becomes easy to envision a
class, even a solely online class, where students interact together to create
their own educational resources and teaching tools. For example, human anatomy could be taught
this way. In the course, the instructor
would maintain the main topic page for overall human anatomy. Students would divide into groups that cover
major systems of the body, for example nervous, circulatory, respiratory,
digestive, musculoskeletal, and integumentary systems. For their respective
systems, small groups of students would each create topic pages, providing
interesting posts about the system. For the most specific and detailed
information, student could create writings from their own blogs or link to the
interesting pages of others. To help
other students learn about their specific system, each group might write an
assignment for the others groups and post it on their topic pages. A separate assignment topic page could be
maintained, or students could post comments with links to completed
assignments. To provide an overall catalog of each system, the main course
topic page would provide posts to each of the systems, thus the entire body
system maintains a connection under the main page.
For a sequential course series, creating e-classrooms within
Scoop.it! would provide an electronic catalog of coursework. For an instructor, the format is easy to
reference for future courses as example work. As an online format, the ability
to constantly post new information keeps knowledge fresh and up to date.
The advantages to using Scoop.it! as a teaching tool include
that it is free/low-cost and easy to use. Especially with using the education
version, the ability to incorporate group collaboration and promote teamwork is
pretty amazing. Disadvantages of the
tool include reliance on web-based information for creating your tools because
not every source online is a good source.
Additionally, in using the program, I had some glitches with a very
slightly outdated web browser (Explorer 7), and in trying to use the program at
work where we have very high security settings, the program was repeatedly
recognized as “entertainment” so I had to verify it everytime I opened the
site. Overall, these were pretty minor
glitches to work around and I really enjoyed using Scoop.it!
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