Edward+Nelson-Scoop.It

**Web Address:** www.scoop.it **Student’s Name:** Edward Nelson **Grade level(s):** 6th-University **Content area(s):** All areas
 * What: **Scoop.It

 **Abstract:** At first sight Scoop.It appears to be a fancy search engine. It is more than a tool for casual web browsing though. While Scoop.It does offer internet search capabilities, it has a lot more to offer and, quite frankly, is not very practical for basic searches. Scoop.It can best be described as a medium of online curating. Users begin by searching topics of interest. Afterwards, Scoop.It generates a list of related online material including blogs, twitter profiles, news feeds, YouTube, and Slideshare. This list comes in the form of an interactive catalog from which relevant sites can be added into a collection or discarded. This collection can be saved for future reflection and shared with others (that’s right—you can look at other people’s Scoops) via Scoop.It or social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

 **Personal Experience:** Scoop.It is very new to me. I have only used it a handful of times to help inform me for this assignment. In my limited experience, I used it for the purpose of professional development. For example, I typed in “teaching mathematics” and a number of suggestions came up on the topic. While some of these where helpful, many were just news articles about teachers. However, Scoop.It does let users control what sources it searches, therefore helping people weed out unrelated sites. Finally, I also used Scoop.It to peruse other people’s Scoops and found pretty interesting work. Scoop.It even let me follow other people and keep tabs on their work.