This was a hard assignment and I am still learning how to create my home page and how to use it in my work. I experimented with a personal home page several years ago using a Google product but abandoned it because it slowed down my computer so much it became a bit of a nuisance. However, there are now many more tools for creating home pages with better technology, which also seems to have solved the problem of slowing down the computer.
For this assignment I chose Netvibes because I was inspired by the selection of examples Polly gave us, particularly the AISB Elementary School page created by Sarah Ducharme. Her page is useful, colorful and inviting and I am hoping to create a home page that will be equally attractive and functional for my students and school community.
It took me longer than I anticipated to learn how to create my Netvibes home page, but luckily I had help from my teenage son who is braver about clicking on everything on the screen to find out how everything works! It also took me longer than I expected to work out how to embed RSS feeds and useful Web sites into the page. Another hurdle was how to make my dashboard public after I had created it as a private page; I still haven't worked out if I can change a dashboard from private to public. So, I created a second dashboard with identical RSS feeds and Web sites but made sure it was public from the start!
I think Netvibes could be a great tool for providing resources for students, teachers, and parents in an attractive format. There can be links to research tools, interesting Web sites, news, and just plain fun. This is a highly visual tool that I think everyone would enjoy using. My site is a work in progress and I anticipate that I will work on it gradually over the coming months. One idea I have is to have a tab for each grade level and align the content with the curriculum. This could take me quite a while . . .
For this assignment I chose Netvibes because I was inspired by the selection of examples Polly gave us, particularly the AISB Elementary School page created by Sarah Ducharme. Her page is useful, colorful and inviting and I am hoping to create a home page that will be equally attractive and functional for my students and school community.
It took me longer than I anticipated to learn how to create my Netvibes home page, but luckily I had help from my teenage son who is braver about clicking on everything on the screen to find out how everything works! It also took me longer than I expected to work out how to embed RSS feeds and useful Web sites into the page. Another hurdle was how to make my dashboard public after I had created it as a private page; I still haven't worked out if I can change a dashboard from private to public. So, I created a second dashboard with identical RSS feeds and Web sites but made sure it was public from the start!
I think Netvibes could be a great tool for providing resources for students, teachers, and parents in an attractive format. There can be links to research tools, interesting Web sites, news, and just plain fun. This is a highly visual tool that I think everyone would enjoy using. My site is a work in progress and I anticipate that I will work on it gradually over the coming months. One idea I have is to have a tab for each grade level and align the content with the curriculum. This could take me quite a while . . .