Scribd

Scribd is an online publishing site. This is where a person can share/publish personally written academic material. This is an interesting concept. I have never seen this site before this class. It appears to me to be a social sharing site for articles, documents, papers, etc. Access to these documents can be provided via a URL. Currently I use Google Pages and Google Sites. I do this so that I have a place to host my training sheets that will provide a URL that I can send out for people to access. It appears to me that Scribd does the same think. Recently one of my professors needed a URL to upload a document in Second Life and I was able to use Scribd to accommodate that.
I found it very interesting that you can log into Scribd with your Facebook account. Doing so allowed me to see anyone of my friends who happened to be using Scribd as well. Out of approximately 180 friends 2 were using Scribd. I was able to view any documents that they had uploaded. I found that very enjoyable. In this sense it can also be considered another avenue for knowledge sharing. Topics would likely be very diverse as you are able to pull information from a network like Facebook. However that could simply be another advantage for utilizing this site.
I am interested to learn and discover ways to utilize this in the classroom. As of now I am thinking English and History classes would benefit much from this site. This is a place where students can share documents and information with the class as a whole. Not necessarily a turn it in site, in my opinion, but a sharing site for certain. The upload process was very simple. Students and teachers alike should find this site very simple to use. This would be a great way for teachers to ensure that students have around the clock access to any class materials handed out. A teacher could offer extra credit work to any student who accesses supplemental material from this site and either makes comments on or uploads a simple report to their own scribd site. There are so many possibilities for integration with this. I will explore this site further, collaborate with teachers, and together we will develop a project with this site in the upcoming school year and see where it takes us.

You can access scribd by visiting http://www.scribd.com/.
You can see an upload from me by clicking here.