Personal Learning Plans & PageFlakes December 6, 2007
Posted by emiaukea in online tools, technology.trackback
Before I was torn away to go to Chris’ farewell lunch I was participating in a very interesting WebJunction webinar, part of their ‘Learning’ series. Some of you know how intrigued I am with the idea of developing a ‘Personal Learning Plan’ and trying to encourage others to join me in the journey for themselves and also because I think we’ll all learn more an have fun in a group.
Now to the point…and that is to share this cool web tool I just heard about today called PageFlakes. It’s one of many tool/sites that use a technology called Ajax that lets you create a custom online ‘environment.’ Starting with their wizard and with a little extra (simple!) work on my part about half an hour I was all set-up with my own Start Page. I was able to drag and drop widgets around on the screen (called ‘flakes’) so I can see and access my Gmail, local news and weather, a calendar, several podcasts, a calculator and more! They even have a RSS reader if you have lots of blogs to keep track of.
Check it out! A few hints from my own experience — it’s not that obvious that you need to create an account to save your settings and get a unique URL. Once you do that (and verify your email address) you’ll be able to tell it where you live in your settings.
If you make your PageFlake public, make sure you ping me so we can see each other: my username is elizabeth.iaukea.
I’m glad you got some ideas from the Webinar, your page looks great!
[...] December 12, 2007 PLE is for me Posted by Betha under Cool Tools, Free Stuff I’m the kind of person who learns best from concrete examples. I had already informed myself about the nature of Personal Learning Environments before attending last week’s webinar, but seeing some sample PLE pages really motivated me to go create my own. I wasn’t the only one, judging by these blog posts. [...]
I just read a brief review of PageFlakes in PC Magazine where it was listed as the “site of the week”. Hopefully you can read the review here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2229890,00.asp
They say that PageFlakes surpass the new My Yahoo!, Windows Live and iGoogle, which it resembles. I’ve used My Yahoo! intermittently for years, but I’ve never tried any of the others, including PageFlakes. If only there were more hours in the day to play!