Useful Tech Tools: Scoop.it!

If you are looking for a way to incorporate current events into your class or just share resources with students or faculty, scoop.it is a great tool to use! Scoop.it is somewhat like a professional Pinterest page.

With scoop.it, you create a profile with topics. In each topic, you collect articles or videos that relate to the topic and you can curate them by adding your own thoughts about the content. Then you publish to your page/topic. Your account is usually connected to a social media account which will post your material as well, but there is an option to create an account not connected to social media.

The website is geared towards businesses with a marketing angle, but if you search users you will find a lot of college professors and teachers that are using the website to collect resources for their classes.

There is a free account option which is great but the downside is you are only allowed to curate one topic on that account and you don’t really have any personalization options. There is also a pro account and a business account. That give you more topics and personalization options.

Once you are signed up, you can set up your topic and begin curating content (basically publishing articles and videos to your topic). It also allows you to add a bookmarklet so when you are browsing the Internet and you find an article or video you want, you can click on the bookmarklet to “scoop it” and curate content on the spot (just like Pinterest).  Your topic can be embedded in a website and/or LMS and can be shared as a link.

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Uses in the Classroom/School as an Educator:

• Current Events - This is a great way for you to connect current events to your content by adding relevant articles and videos and describe for you students the connections to the content.
• Research Resources - This also could be used to house good websites for research on particular content.
• Personal Professional Development - This can be used just for you to collect articles on our great education profession or skills you are interested in building up on.
• Staff Professional Development - If the district/building has a specific focus, this could be used as place to collect resources on that focus and share with the staff. A building or school could have teacher create accounts and join a community so all resources could be shared.

Uses in the Classroom as a Student:

• Current Events - On the opposite side, you could have students create accounts and use this a place to reflect on current events related to your content. They would curate articles and videos and have to show how they relate to the content being covered.
• Research Resources - This is good way for students to do research and collect sources and at the same time have to curate them. They can look at to use the source and summarize the content for future use in a research project. ​