Travel Diaries of a Web 2.0 Newbie

One of my first thoughts when exploring Pageflakes was, “Very nice, but when am I going to need to use this?” I can see how it is much easier to use and more flexible than a webpage, but in my particular situation, a lot of its benefits overlap with our school’s Moodle virtual learning environment (VLE). Unfortunately, the VLE doesn’t allow guest access so I can’t illustrate what I mean. It allows me to do most of the things that Pageflakes does, but with a more personal focus on my individual students, who have to enrol in my course in the VLE. Now, were I to move to a school without a VLE, Pageflakes would be one of my first ports of call, if setting up the Moodle site was going to be beyond my capabilities.

I could imagine setting up a number of different pages, each geared toward a different year group, and each having links to relevant webpages and also the ability to download documents or files from class, or set as homework assignments. I really liked the look of the NKO Math Clusters pagecast – such a time-saving resource to have as a teacher, and a simple way to organise resources for students. The fact that Delicious pages can be linked in as a flake means that by carefully tagging bookmarks in Delicious with a year group tag, all the relevant bookmarks can be displayed in a single flake. This should save the page becoming too cluttered – I don’t like the idea of having to scroll down through a page to get to the section I am interested in – if it’s to be used as a type of homepage it should be uncluttered and obvious, in my opinion.

I liked the way the Elementary China webquest was laid out – this would be a great template for any sort of extension project work for my classes. All the relevant documents can be accessed from a flake on the Teacher Page and pre-selected websites grouped according to their area of relevance. This should lessen the common problem I find, of students just using/copying the first page they come across that looks relevant – if the page is understandable to them, hopefully, they will put more effort into reading it properly. The teacher resource documents were stored on box.net – maybe I’m being stupid, but are there other sites like this, that allow document storage for retrieval (and not for editing, like Google docs)? Liked the use of a voki for the introductory blurb as well.

The Noticeboard flake would also be useful for communicating with a class if you didn’t want to depend on them checking their email, or if you didn’t want to to collect all their email addresses.

I think the big danger with a Pageflake pagecast is information overload – because it is so easy to add flakes, and you think, “That would be good.” and “That would be useful.” and before you know it, the page is crowded out and nothing is obvious. However, careful planning and organisation should prevent this problem.