For this week’s note taking challenge I wanted to use Glogster. However, after several attempts to create an account, I gave up. I was continually redirected to the edu Glogster site, which is not free. The registration on the free site has been disabled. This was very disheartening, so I went back through the list. Most of the other applications I have already used for this assignment. I decided to use Scoop.it or Storify. I have been avoiding both of these because I really do not see how either of these would be useful for note taking in the traditional sense. Both seem more suited for a particular type of online note taking or curating. I first choose Storify because it was easier to create an account with Storify. Scoop.it required activation and I did not feel like logging into my email. Too many steps. However, after starting Storify, I became uninterested and went back to Sccop.it. After activation, it was easier to get started with Scoop.it because it automatically walks you through the getting started process.

I had never heard of Sccop.it prior to this class, so I was not sure what to expect. After going through the getting started walk through, I titled my Scoop.it “brain rules.” I used "brain rules" and "music" as my search terms. Several hundred articles popped up for me to Scoop. I browsed through a few and selected a couple by hitting the scoop.it button. I then typed in some comments or “insights” and hit publish for each one. There were a lot of indirectly related articles that popped up, so I added "john medina" to my search terms; this didn’t change the results much. I attempted to upload my notes as a Word Document, but I was unable to because I do not have a pro account. I was also not able to share it via traditional embed or link. To share, I could choose 2 social networks. However to share with unlimited networks, I would need a pro account. This was interesting for researching or curating, as scoop.it defines it, but I couldn’t really take notes. To get around this, I scooped the music page from the Brain Rules website and added my notes in as insights. This allowed me to link the text’s webpage and supplemental with my notes. I liked that. I think Scoop.it is definitely great for doing research online. It allows the user to scoop the sites, save them together, and make notes about the sites’ contents. I found this useful for curating articles and videos related to my dissertation topic. As someone who is interested in researching popular culture, this is a great way for me to quickly scour what’s out there.



I would love to use this site for an annotated bibliography assignment or an activity on evaluating sources. Students could find webpages related to their topics, scoop them and then write up annotations. Students could also scoop several sites and then write small evaluations or reviews about the sites in the insights section. This is a good way to compare/contrast useful, credible sources with the not so credible sources that students often find on the web. There are so many options with Scoop.it. My only concern are the limitations that come with the free version. Sharing is limited and uploading documents is not available. These are things I would want students to have access to for the course. Overall, I am now a fan of Scoop.it and plan on using it for upcoming projects.

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