Scooping Links for Moodle

When it comes to presenting a course in Moodle I often find myself trying to think of alternatives to the default means of materials presentation through the links to documents and websites approach, and the other day I discovered Scoopit. I have actually seen these websites before, but not taken the time to look into them any further. If you have not come across Scoopit yet then the approach is basically this, rather than simply collecting a series of your favourite links for others to tryout, Scoopit organises and presents a snapshot of the target websites and organises them into a multi-row two column display. If you would like to give it a try then the whole set-up is extremely straightforward, simply create a free account, name your topic, enter a description and some keywords. To gather content for your topic you can either Click-On the Curate button that appears on the page, this will generate a set of suggested sites, or use the Bookmark facility, essentially by dropping the Scoopit bookmark onto browsers toolbar and Scooping while you surf, very effective.

By using my Scoopit Topic url as the website address in a Moodle course link the students can now simply use this to review the sites that I am recommending for them, much better than creating a link for each site.

Finally, and I do like this, every Scoop can be posted to your social networking sites and include among others Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, plus there are apps for the iPhone and Android, so you can Scoop on the move.

 

If you are using Scoopit, have discovered other means to display your links then please feel free to comment.