New tool turns online resources into a “playlist”

Whether I’m preparing for an upcoming learning event with students or for professional learning and collaboration with colleagues, I always feel like I have too many online resources to keep them organized. I have an online bookmarking tool, and that has helped somewhat, but E-school newsrecently published a short article about MentorMob. Mentormob allows you to create (or search) “playlists” for Web content on subjects/themes you specify. Once the resources are all compiled, you or others can browse through the “playlist”….in essence, taking an online tour of the topic.
The article from E-School News spoke mostly of its use to educators as they look for (and ultimately find) resources related to themes and lessons, but I think this could also be useful for students. It could function much like Trackstar that lets teachers put all of the web resources their students will need in one place, but the layout and feel of MentorMob is much more modern.
Navigating a playlist in MentorMob is quite easy. Check out this playlist with articles on 21st century skills.

I wonder what it would look like if I had students create playlists demonstrating what they’ve learned and where they learned it. Ideally, such a playlist would start with their own student-created site (using wikispaces, googledocs, etc.) and then “flow” into other sites that informed their content. But even if it doesn’t turn out to be good for showing student proficiency with content, Mentormob has a lot of promise as a place for teachers to find, create, store and share thematic online resources.

When I went on the site to explore it for the first time today, I noticed it is in “alpha” release. As we know, this means they are “trying it out” to see how it fares with the public. They may even be looking for feedback (I recently featured another alpha release of the tool Socrative--after trying the tool in class, I found it promising but lacking in some key features, particularly the ability to view questions, answer choices and student responses as a class so we can discuss them). Mentormob is currently free.