Sunday, June 7, 2009

Creating a web2.0 Library with Pageflakes


Inspired by The Unquiet Library's Pageflakes I spent some time today developing several pages for my high school library. Several weeks ago I staked our claim by setting up accounts on Twitter, Facebook and delicious in addition to the library wiki I set up some time ago. I am so very happy that The Unquiet Library has been generous enough to share their pages. It has given me a starting place that I can learn from and build on. I hope to encourage staff members to start their own pages which can be added as this resource grows.

This YouTube video gives a quick explanation on sharing options for your pages - Pageflakes: how to share your page.

One of my main reasons for taking the library online has been to encourage students to read using as many tools as possible. The Unquiet Library has some great ideas for feeds on their YA Lit 2.0 page. These include author interviews and book trailers from YouTube, author blogs and teen books review blogs.

A Teen Author Blog index can be found on the TeenLib Wiki. At the bottom of the list of authors are links to other lists of teen author blogs. I chose a couple of authors that are popular with our students as well as the fabulous Reading Rants blog.

Check your local public library for blog feeds. Ours is running a summer reading book club that I've added a feed for.

This will be a work in progress as I hope to:
- add pages for socials, science and english classes
- set up pages for specific large research projects
- add a flickr feed for images around a theme.
- create news feeds for events such as elections or the upcoming 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver.

Are you using Pageflakes or an equivalent service like Netvibes? How do you envision it being used to serve a school library community? Please offer your comments!

Image credit to me!

3 comments:

booklover472 said...

Lesley,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on starting Pageflakes pages for your library! Buffy Hamilton at the UnquietLibrary is an inspiration.
Although I don't have any Pageflake or Netvibe pages to share now, I do want to work on some over the summer.

http://www.informania.wordpress.com

Katie Day said...

I am also a fan of the Unquiet Librarian, alias Buffy Hamilton. And I'm a Netvibes fan (having read, perhaps wrongly, that Pageflakes might not survive in the long term). Anyway, see my blog post on using Netvibes for library pages. http://libedge.blogspot.com/2009/03/pulling-it-all-together-online.html

Also see my Netvibes page where I am collecting links to other library Netvibes pages:
http://www.netvibes.com/uwcseast#Other_schools%27_Netvibes

because the beauty of both Pageflakes and Netvibes is that we can easily "steal" each others' flakes....

-- Katie Day
Teacher-Librarian

MrsE said...

Thanks Katie,
Love seeing how other people are using the tools.
I wonder if I can import from Pageflakes to Netvibes should the need arise. I see so much potential for this kind of information retrieval.
Lesley