Pageflakes as a Blogging Portal

Here’s a quick idea that might prove useful for educators currently using – or thinking about using – blogs in classroom exercises.

One of the challenges of individual student blogs is the fact they’re independent of one another. So by themselves there’s no easy way to keep track of the activity from a single location.

I’ve seen instructors set up a blog to act as an index or portal, where each student blog is referenced with a link and description, or with each student’s blog contributions displayed as an RSS feed in the menu. However both options are still somewhat lacking.

Considering my recent experimentation with Pageflakes I have discovered an alternative that some may find useful. From their About page:

“Pageflakes is the easiest way to discover and share your favorite things on the Web. Whether you are trying to keep your family informed, track the many blogs and news sources that you read daily, promote a small business, or just wanting to express your ideas and interests, Pageflakes provides you everything in pages with your own unique mix.”

Pageflakes is a web-based aggregator for tonnes of different types of content. Users have the ability to select from a huge (and growing) library of different widgets, thereby creating customised pages that contain content from across the web. This can include videos, static text, email tools (for reading, sending and receiving), and importantly displaying RSS feeds.

Importantly, Pageflakes includes a feature known as Pagecasts, which enables you to make your pages visible to others. With Pagecasts you create a page as per normal, select Make Pagecast, and then select a visibility option (private, share with nominated individuals or group, and publish openly). Once configured the the page is visible at the level you have identified.

In the context of classroom blogging projects, this could easily be used as a portal whereby students and staff could browse through the recent contributions. Given the view options include the ability to restrict access to nominated individuals you could also maintain a level of privacy where only classroom participants have access, or open it up as a showcase for what your class is doing.

I’ve created an example I’ve called the “edubloggers aggregate” (see image) which contains the feeds for 12 of the blogs I follow. Personally I find the Pageflakes format much more conducive to browsing than a blog-as-portal. In some ways it even looks like an online magazine.

This was put together fairly quickly too, so with a bit of effort you could make one look even nicer and include information such as project background, blogging assignments, references or resources or other functionality offered by the widget library.

The flexibility offered by Pageflakes is an ideal option for tying an unrelated mass of disparate blogs into one unified portal, which in turn can reinforce the notion that the blogosphere is comprised of people, and not just content.

References:

• edubloggers aggregate on Pageflakes
• Pageflakes – http://www.pageflakes.com