New Technologies and 21st Century Skills

SCOOP.IT

Tool Category/ies: Communication Creativity Presentation

License Type: Free + Pay Options

Overall Rating

4/5

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.

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Scoops on a topic you created

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Reviews

Rating: 4/5

Reviewed by: Alyssa Hill on 03/21/2013

Description
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.

How to use Scoopit in a teaching environment
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.

Advantages of using Scoopit
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 using Scoopit
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!

Rating: 4/5

Reviewed by: Jenna Miller on 03/21/2013

Description
Scoop it can be used by many genres of internet users. It is a unique tool to create a central location for internet topics the users find interesting or useful. Scoop it allows the user to bookmark internet sites that he or she will later want to refer to or review. The website keeps these bookmarked items in a central location based on the users settings and creates a visually appealing webpage with the catalogued items. A user may have several topics of interest he or she is tracking and thus can have several scoop it pages to keep his or her bookmarked information separate and organized.

The scoop it page can be shared on social media sites such as facebook or twitter. It can also be embedded directly into a blog. The sharing capabilities of Scoop it are quite numerous. This allows the user to create scoop it sites that can be used and shared with friends, co-workers or students. The internet supplies a vast wealth of information and no one person can read everything however scoop it allows for a user to create an easily readable webpage that can transfer the salient items related to a topic to multiple other readers. This task is accomplished by users having the option to follow other scoop it pages as well as search for topics that users are interested in.

Things to know before using Sccopit
A user needs to know how to navigate the internet to first find scoop it. A user will also want to have an idea of the topics he or she will want to use scoop it to organize.

Resources required to use Scooptit
Computer, with internet connection

How to use Scoopit in a teaching environment
Scoop it could be used in a grammar or high school to keep track of current events. Many classes such as social studies and government studies use current events as a teaching tool in class to discuss topics that are currently being studied as part of the class curriculum or to keep abreast of up to date information. The instructor can keep a scoop it page of topics he or she finds appropriate to the discussion of the class. This provides control to the instructor of the topics that the students can report on. The instructor can then ask the students to subscribe to the page to choose the article from the curated scoop it page that they wish to report on in class. Currents events is a well-known teaching tool however scoop it allows this traditional teaching forum to be updated to use online technology tools while still maintaining the value of the conventional current events assignment.

Advantages of using Scoopit
The registration process is easy and free on scoop it. Beginning to curate a scoop it page is also quite easy and the webpage created is organized an appealing to the eye.

Disadvantages of using Scoopit
While the website it easy to navigate, there is no home page that gives an overall synopsis of the purpose of scoop it and how to use it generally. For users like me who happen upon scoop it, a general reference page would be helpful. The FAQ link on the page is quite extensive however the user must have a specific question in mind prior to visiting this page. I think the easiest use of scoop it would therefore be to users who already knew how the webpage operated.

Examples and External Resources

Example using Scoopit uploaded on 03/21/2013

http://www.scoop.it/t/web2-0-for-modern-medical-education

Another example using Scoopit uploaded on 03/21/2013

http://www.scoop.it/t/learninganalytix