Well, I went to the link for Netvibes, and created my own homepage. It was fairly easy in terms of what I wanted to keep on there (there was a basic page created for you), and what links/items I wanted to delete or change. It was an interesting hour or so of playing with the page and I came out with a few thoughts on the matter.
1. The page is wayyy to busy, and I now respect Google for using so much white space on their homepage. I understand why I'm attracted to that search engine over Yahoo and other search engines. I also feel as though maintaining my own personal page would be a lot of work, when I post items on social networking sites like Facebook for myself and my family.
2. In terms of the educational system and using a personal homepage for my classroom, I can see the benefit of having everything in one place, all of the calendar information, homework information and other important notes that could be lost in transit. I do think, however, that the school has a great website for many of those items that have to do with the general population. I could see setting up a basic webpage, but not with any of those sites that have been listed below. They are a great starting place, and a great place to learn about the options you have, but I would not choose to do this type of webpage for my students or their parents/guardians.
The custom homepage is really more of an organizational tool for you to have easy access to all of the places that you like to visit. It really is not meant to take the place of a classroom webpage for students. I use igoogle at school and have quick access to all of the educational blogs and wikis that I follow - including pages that i use with my class officers. I also have a link to delicious there so I can quickly access all of my web bookmarks. It does help to organize all of the "stuff" out there.
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