Yeah! It’s finally here and I can open my mouth.  Pageflakes, the RSS aggregator and now so much more, has released it’s new edition.  I had the distinct honor, and advantage to be among the first group to demo the Blizzard Edition.  I gotta tell you it was a blast.  Dan and the pageflakes team were absolutely dedicated to getting it right.  So much so, they delayed the release by close to a month.  Was it because they were slow and unprepared?  No, it was because they took every piece of feedback we gave them and addressed it. 

Enough smoke, check out my pagecasts and play with it yourself.  I think you will find a huge amount of personalization that is only limited by your imagination.  Be sure to use the anything flake and the web page flake.  It may become your one stop on the web.

Be Good

You can PM me at kpruitt@dasd.k12.pa.us.

If you are creating your own, please forward your public “pagecast.”  It would be great to see this come together.  

Check out the page:  http://www.pageflakes.com/kpruitt/11201963

Read what was behind the idea:  http://kpruitt.edublogs.org/2007/06/07/aggregators-as-communities/

First, I can’t say that I am a big fan of the online conference.  It’s the blur of a chat room, the bad audio, and sometimes disasterous presentors that keep me watching re-runs rather than participating in real time.  (By the way, thank you to the person that thought of recording and posting presentations.  It’s like TiVo’d education ) However, Dave did it right.  He demonstarted a tool within the context of potential use.

Dave used the aggregator, PageFlakes, as a web portal.  (see it here) He set up each of his ”flakes” to aggregate certain tags (in this case foe2007scm.)  He then encouraged the students to create a blog post or tag a flickr pic.  After a few minutes and a quick page refresh, links started to pour in from the attendees.  I literally sat slack-jawed in my clunky K-Mart recliner.  It was so simple, yet so cool.  

Sure wikis and even expensive web-portals can do similar things but here, right in front of our eyes was a FREE 10 minute answer to keeping everything…and I mean EVERYTHING, in one place.  Just off the top of my head.  This is reseach, assessment, collaboration, community, and even entertainment placed into a nice neat package.

Here are two communities I am working on.  I cannot stress how ease this was.  I hope that I can energize others the way Dave unknowingly energized me.

For teachers at DuBois  http://www.pageflakes.com/kpruitt/11176389   

For PA tech Teachers   http://www.pageflakes.com/kpruitt/11201963

Obviously, I am only working on local items.  I have no idea where this is going nor am I sure what the impact will be.  I can tell you one thing, the success or failure will be clear.  In fact, it will be availble for millions to see.