Scribd

Scribd is the world’s largest social reading and publishing company. They've made it easy to share and discover informative and written content online and through mobile devices. Their vision is to "liberate the written word", to connect people with the information and ideas that matter most to them, and to make it possible for anyone to share their written documents from anywhere in the world. Scribd is mostly used for academic papers and other research documents.

Main Features: This website is a new addition to the social networking phenomenon. It allows its users to upload original content, whether it be school work, your resume, or novel you are working on, and share that content across the internet with people all over the globe. Each piece of literature that a user uploads becomes searchable through internet search engines. Along with self-publishing, you can gather followers and follow your friends like on Twitter or Facebook. You can read their work and "readcast" it, to make that piece of writing more popular. Also, your profile includes a nice "Stats" feature that allows you to see how many people have read your shared work, where they are from and on average how long people are looking at your documents.

Level Of Difficulty: This website is like any other social media site; very straight-forward and easy to use. It allows you to set up a profile within minutes and import your friends as followers/followees from Facebook and other social media sites. It requires a slight learning curve, but nothing that cannot be accomplished in a few short minutes, even by the most technologically fearful individual.

Potential Application: This website would be a great tool to use in the classroom. If each student sets up an account, they could all follow one another and upload their written work for each other to see, read, and critique. You could assign homework in terms of group evaluations where student's read over their peers work and offer constructive comments.

Conclusion: This website is a great addition to the social media phenomenon and a potential classroom tool. Scribd helps create a bridge between academics and peer social interactivity. It is akin to Facebook, Twitter, and Google Docs, in that you can share your ideas with other members of the online community. However, unlike other social networking sites, Scribd allows you the post long academic papers and other documents- a social studies teachers dream come true!