As we shiver through the cold weather, sleet, and snow that has hit the metro Atlanta area this weekend, I have had a different kind of “flake” on my mind: a cool Web 2.0 tool I discovered this weekend called Pageflakes.
What is Pageflakes, you may ask? It is a cool Web 2.0 tool that allows users to create personalized online desktops similar to that of iGoogle. Users can easily add widgets or “flakes” related to education, photos, social bookmarking sites, news, podcasts, fun games, and even comic strips!
I created a pagecast for our media center this weekend to help promote our library resources; we will be adding additional pages featuring podcasts (student created as well as librarian created!) in February. Our pagecast is designed to give our users another avenue for accessing our library resources as well as provide a little fun for them where they can play online games, listen to our podcasts (coming in February), and view RSS feeds to some of our most popular library resources.
Using Pageflakes is fairly easy: you create an account, and then you add content to pages you create by simply selecting content-based widgets you want on your page. You can add RSS feed widgets to your favorite resources that are not on the diverse menu available through Pageflakes, too. You also have many themes and color schemes as well as layout schemes to customize your page. To make your page viewable, you then choose the option to make your “page” a “pagecast”; once you take this step, your page is viewable to everyone else via a static link.
This is a tool teachers could also use to complement their websites; students can also create their very own pageflake account at http://student.pageflakes.com/. Best of all, the service is free, and as long as your district does not block it with their filter, you can log into it and edit it any time while at school.
You can learn more about Pageflakes in this PC Magazine review from December 7, 2007. To get an idea of what a library-based pagecast looks like, please surf over to our newly created pagecast at The Unquiet Library Pagecast!
Buffy Hamilton, Ed.S.
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com
