Another addition to the suit of Web 2.0 tools customized with advantages for K-12 educators. We’ve already got Wikispaces, VoiceThreads, WetPaint Wiki, and Ning.
Another tool I regularly promote is PageFlakes , which now has PageFlakes Teacher Edition – with a nice specialist education focus.
This is Cool! if it remains open for sharing – no strings attached.
I did a search amongst the repository and found some nice PageCasts, e.g. Middle School Literacy and Harry Potter Feeds, as example. There is a huge long list of Flakes (widgets) you can add to customise your PageCast..
The Pageflakes team explains:
You can customize this page by adding and deleting Flakes (Widgets). Click the yellow button at the top right corner to:
- browse the Educational Gallery
- change the layout
- customize your theme
- share and publish your page
By default, all your pages are private. To publish a page or to share it with your colleagues please click on “Make Pagecast”. Of course you can have as many pages (tabs) as you want.
Why not setup a private page to start with? And when you’re ready, you may create a public Pagecast (check out our Pagecast Gallery) or a group Pagecast (shared page) for you and your colleagues – great for sharing notes, news and documents.
judyoconnell.com 
Thanks for the news of this Judy…
I love the way pageflakes makes publishing RSS feeds and other assorted goodies easily.
I’ve recently got stuck into the Google Reader though, and find this a great online reader to promote to students compiling their own feeds…
It’d be great to see Google get into publishing feed lists in the same way Pageflakes allows.
M
Thank you, Judy for sharing this. I haven’t gotten to figure it out totally but it looks like a great tool!
Thanks for the update Judy. I will check it out today. Have been a Pageflakes user for over 1 year now and I think the new teacher edition is a great idea.
Regards
Marcy
I use this tool at the secondary level and have created Pagecasts for both English and Social Studies projects. I discovered that it makes sense to create an email account per department so that I can separate say psychology projects from literary criticism projects. The teachers and students love it and the “on ramp” to PageFlakes is much quicker than getting info on our webpage. Also, beware the Message Board. Students can post to it, not always appropriately, so it needs to be monitored.