Scribd: Aggregator of e-documents

Scribd offers a collaborative platform where you publish, discover and discuss original writings and documents. There are over 50 million people who share and upload documents each month. More than 50,000 documents are uploaded daily, and overall the documents are in 90 languages. Here’s a review of Scribd that gives a pretty good overview of what you can do with it. It’s claimed that you’ll find more information on Scribd than on Wikipedia – about 5 billion words versus 2 billion. You can not only use it for document sharing, but also as a place for storage where you can manage all your files online. Instead of having students upload their assignments to Moodle, the teacher can use Scribd for submissions and for giving feedback.

Typically, uploaded documents are PowerPoint presentations, academic research articles, school papers, free online books, Excel spreadsheets, essays, and more. Naturally, unauthorized copyrighted material is prohibited.

I signed up for a free account and searched for dictionaries: within a few minutes, I downloaded a dictionary on psychology, philosophy, a glossary of linguistic and education-related terminology, a college dictionary, and a Longman dictionary, an English language learning program for kids, a lesson plan on cultural differences, and finally a set of language tests including solutions. The docs can be downloaded as PDF or txt files.

I think it’s a goldmine for teachers who are looking for ebooks and any other readings they want to share with their students. It can also be recommended to students who are researching on a topic. I’m sure that all the above documents are available elsewhere on the internet, but Scribd is a nice aggregator of all these files, which makes the search process so much more efficient than having to browse twenty different websites.