I seem to spend a lot of time curating resources for students and teachers, and I'll bet you do, too! I've used Diigo, Scoop.it and Symbaloo, but am growing very fond of elink. Some of the advantages I love:
- It's visually appealing. Elink pulls an image from the website you're sharing, and if it doesn't, it's easy to quickly upload one.
- Unlike Symbaloo, Elink will pull a snippet of text from the website. You can edit, delete, add explanatory text, etc. I can guide students to specific parts of a website after they've explore the home page.
- It's FAST! Choose your template (there are a few free ones and several pro options,) start adding your links, rearrange the order, give your elink a name, and publish!
- I just heard from Raj at elink, and learned you can share Google Sheets, Forms, Docs, and YouTube videos without ads (they open on a black background and look beautiful, so I'll use it, even though some people like my daughter make their travel income from YouTube ads!)
I've used it in a variety of ways:
- To share research links or examples with students.
- To quickly curate links for collaborative projects
- To have students create a version of an annotated works cited page. We've asked students to create them to demonstrate their understanding of website evaluation criteria.
- To create book lists for our summer reading bingo.
The downsides:
- Elink is a 13 and up site.
- There's currently no way to sign up with Google, which would be great for our students. Right now, they have to use another Gmail account, since our school accounts do not allow them to receive email from outside the district.
- They're touting their new product with a banner ad at the bottom of the elink page. It's large enough to be a distraction--at least to me, if not to students!
Via Mary Reilley Clark
Have you tried elink? What are your thoughts?