Aggrava... I mean Aggregating Site Exploration
Here is a link to my current Aggregating Site with Protopage!
Well, here is a concept that I was anxious to explore. I’ve heard of and seen some pages that aggregate information, but I definitely haven’t tried to use one since high school (probably). I started out my adventure with NetVibes, which I abandoned after about an hour or two of confusion. Originally, I picked NetVibes after seeing their homepage. Between NetVives and ProtoPage, NetVibes definitely looked more professional, however the learning curve was a little steeper than I anticipated. I also was drawn in by the examples on the home page of NetVibes, but I’m at a loss for how to get my own page to look like theirs! Maybe the examples are from paid accounts? I abandoned it, so I guess I won’t find out any time soon.
Not knowing where to turn next, I did a quick Google search of aggregating sites and found a few articles with lists of different sites to try. After reading a few of these articles, I still felt uncertain about where to begin, so I turned back to the class website. There were a lot of interesting reads, though! And it seems like a lot of people use WordPress as both a blog and an aggregating site, which definitely makes me think about using WordPress in the future as my blogging platform!
After exploring the discussion for this week, I decided that ProtoPage was probably the easier to learn of the two (and maybe I’m better suited to it since I’m new to aggregating pages). I signed up with ProtoPage and started playing with the different Widgets that you can add. I pretty quickly deleted a lot of the ones that were on the initial page, like Fox News (not my preferred news source), and NPR (which I almost kept!). I changed the name of my page and added it as a chrome extension as well. I didn’t like that it set my actual starter page to ProtoPage, because I like to initially have access to my Google tools since that’s what we have on our campus, so I had to reset that feature. I can understand why that is a feature of ProtoPage, though. If I was using my computer for more personal business, I would probably want ProtoPage to show up first since it has bookmarks and information that I normally get from my Google Home in the morning.
I added quite a bit to my page on the first day. The first item of business was changing the weather widget to my actual home instead of California! I tried to do this two different ways: first, by putting in my zip code (which I felt was too personal), then by putting in my home town. Both showed the same weather, so I stuck with home town!
Next, I wanted to change some of the really basic looking colors and background. I knew that I wasn’t experienced with changing them on a coding level, but that the website would allow me to probably change the background. I picked an old dimly-lit library, since I love books! Then, I changed the colors of the widgets and the text inside them. I found all of this very simple on ProtoPage!
I wasn’t sure, at first, how to add more widgets in, so I tried to search for “Twitter” in the search box, which actually brought me to a new tab with a Google search for Twitter! Whoops! I went back to ProtoPage and clicked “Add Widget” and felt a little silly for my mistake! After looking through my options, I added the time and a countdown timer. I use countdown timers in class very frequently, because my students will drag their feet on their assignments since we have 90 minute periods. I get around this by timing them for everything. We also don’t have bells that sound during the day, so the timers help us know when class ends.
Next, I tried clicking a few of the different terms that came up under “Add Widget” like Protopuppy. I added in my little virtual pal in less than a second. I know that Protopuppy probably doesn’t have any use beyond making me smile, but it was nice to see a playful element of ProtoPage! As such, I put Fido at the bottom of the page, since he wasn’t super useful! Here’s Fido the dog for your viewing pleasure!
I also saw a button to add my Google Calendar to my Protopage, which was a great addition. I use Google Calendar for both my personal life and my work life to keep myself organized and remember events. I had a lot of items scheduled this week, so adding in my calendar was a given. It was a little small, but after dragging on the bottom right corner, I was able to make it a bit bigger!
Now that I was done playing around, I decided to get down to adding the widgets that we are required to have for class. This mostly proved easy. I had a bit of a hiccup when I tried to add a Twitter feed versus a Twitter search term, but I eventually was able to add my own Twitter feed and the search #etec527. I’m thinking of also adding in some of the terms from my TweetDeck, which could make my Protopage more like my TweetDeck, but without the capability of actually tweeting from the page. I ended up editing these widgets so that they didn’t show the top 10, but instead the top 4-5, because the length of the widget made it almost pointless to put anything beneath it. I tried to keep my class-related widgets to the right of my page, and my personal widgets on the left. In the middle, I kept the clock, timer, calendar, and Fido!
As you can see, my tumblr blog did not want to pop up at first. I added a website URL widget, and started to see an error every time I opened up my blog. Then, I opened up Tumblr and tried to open my blog from there to see that it also wasn’t working. After a bit of panic, I realized that our district firewall was blocking Tumblr, and, after looking at the page on my phone with my LTE data, noticed that the link does, in fact, work! It’s not a great way of looking at my blog, but it works nonetheless.
Up next was the Youtube Channel playlists. I tried to first link my actual YouTube channel to Protopage with little success. I realized that YouTube doesn’t let you link a full channel to Protopage, but it will do a video. I posted a question to my class in order to try to figure out how other people linked their playlists, but then investigated further by looking at other Protopages from members of the class in the discussion. What I ended up doing, after a bit of Google, Youtube, and Virtual Office research, was to add a “Bookmarks” widget and then link to each of my playlists from there. This worked pretty nicely, so I stuck with it! I did also embed a video, in case I wanted to listen to some music in the morning. I got a little stuck since I only posted one, so I’m just going to enjoy that song every day!
After looking at the example Protopage from our assignment, I wanted to try out making a new tab on Protopage, so I made one for Educational Technology. I used the News and Podcast search features in order to add a few interesting news websites and podcasts that I can listen to when looking into this subject further.
I liked this feature because it meant that I could organize by subject so that I didn’t have to clutter up my main page. It seems like a good feature to be able to use certain tabs for certain activities. For example, my home page would consist of items I want to look at daily. I could have a Reading tab with items related to our reading lessons and a Writing tab, etc. I could even organize it by genre so that I have a tab for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama! I could have a STAAR related tab, to focus on testing. The possibilities seem endless! But, I also see the issue of having too many tabs. On the page for the fourth grade teacher that was linked to us in class, the teacher had many tabs that didn’t have anything in them. It was a bit of a let-down to see these tabs (like the Reading tab!) with not much in it. I would think that you’d probably want to go one at a time and add as much as you could to those tabs before adding more. That might just be my style of organization, though.
As I reflected on my time with aggregating sites, I thought about some of the different uses for this in my classroom and maybe for my students. Since all of my students use Google Classroom in all of their classes, but a different device in each class, I could see a site like Protopages being very useful for them. Similarly to Google Classroom, a Protopage is accessible from many different devices, including mobile devices! I checked on my phone, and while not quite as easy to manipulate, Protopages still works fine from an iPhone browser. They could link searches that are useful to them for different classes and create different tabs for different classes. They could create a bookmarks widget for different classes instead of just bookmarking ALL pages of relevance to them. My students, for example, have to write 4 major papers per year (one per 9 weeks), and they all end up being on different topics. By having a different widget for their bookmarks, they could organize their research for each paper by simply creating a new widget. Students often try to bookmark pages in the browser when they find what they like, but those bookmarks get lost in a sea of links once we get to the 4th paper!
Personally, I still like going to the Google page and accessing my Google tools as my home page. I don’t think I’m ready to make a switch to Protopages for that use, but I could see it being a tab open on my already tab-filled computer! I’ll have to keep investigating further in order to come to a different conclusion!
Thanks for reading!
