Pageflakes

From LIS 460 Summer 2007

[edit]

What is Pageflakes?

Pageflakes is a free, personalized desktop home page in which users arrange "flakes"- small, moveable versions of web sites, interactive research tools, and education specific applications - on a customized web page. Pageflakes has also introduced pagecasts,a programmed Webpage with news feeds, photo feeds, video and other flakes that the user decides to place there. The newest version will allow members the choice to to establish a public profile and there will be a "People" tab added to the site. Members will be able to subscribe to other people's Pagecasts. In other words, the user will be able to subscribe to all the feeds and flakes that person is paying attention to. This is Pageflakes first step toward social networking.

Pageflakes has a separate version for students and educators [1]developed specifically for the classroom environment. It includes such Flakes as Grade tracker, class schedule, to-do-list, message board, class Blog, class calendar, reference tools, as well as the standard flake options and custom flakes. There are flakes available for news, video, RSS feeds, and podcasts. These are just a few of the 100s of options.The Pagecasting option would be useful in aschool environment. Teachers/SLMS can share their pages with students, classes, administration or choose to make the page public.

Advantages

  • easy to set up
  • pre selected flakes to choose from or customization available
  • education version available
  • visually appealing
  • multiple media entry points on one page
  • ability to be used collaboratively

Disadvantages

  • can be overwhelming
  • easy for students to create questionable flakes
  • is this a duplication of effort?
[edit]

Use in the library/classroom

With Pageflakes set up as the home page on each computer in the library lab, the students could walk into the library, and sit down at the computer, discuss the project to be researched, and in front of them would be the following on the home page: the RSS feeds on the subject being studied, links to resources as a flake, newspapers from the area being studied, flakes to the blog for the students reflection logs, a flake to citation makers, a flake to furl. There are flakes to reference tools such as thesaurus and dictionaries, the IPL and other reccomended web sites. There are streaming Videos at one of the flakes, all of this is in one place.

Here is an example of Pageflakes being used as a teacher's homepage with information on Darfur,[2]

Retrieved from "http://gslis.simmons.edu/mw/lis460_summer07/Pageflakes"