Before I blog about today's topic, I have a Twitter addendum. After I logged off the other day, I listed to more news on the radio about the flu outbreak. A reported noted that MANY people were following the government's public health presence on Twitter, to keep up with the latest information. So for many folks, Twitter is becoming what the radio (or television news) has been for past generations: a way to get current, reliable information where they are. Since I'm not "there" in Twitter very often, no wonder I don't get it!
On to Thing 28, customizing a home page. This covers iGoogle, PageFlakes, My Yahoo!, and other productivity tools. I looked back in my blog, and we first focused on this in Thing 13. I looked at the three, and liked PageFlakes the best, so I opened it up. (I discussed in my earlier post what I liked about PageFlakes over the others, but basically it could tell the difference between St. Paul and Minneapolis, and displayed better.) It took me a minute to remember how to navigate, but it was pretty easy. Had to add that Facebook widget right away! I would like to get more on top of podcasts, but I need to learn more about the relationship between my home laptop, iTunes, and podcasts before I get started. I think I'd like to dink around with it a bit more, but I'm going to do some blogging before fun. ;^)
But wait - this is interesting. I looked at the link to the blog post about PageFlakes, and discovered that there's a teacher edition of PageFlakes that can be customized for educators. How cool is that! I like what's in the example - a to-do list, research link (Google, Google, always Google - funny how it isn't "Link to My Library"), educational bookmarks, etc. When you have your "work" hat on, this makes more sense that all of the entertainment widgets in the regular PageFlakes (I'm not that much into modern entertainment.) I want to look at this more later.
On portals and customized pages: we have been talking at my institution about personalized library experiences for a long time. We'd look around the web and see it done at other institutions; why not here? Either our IT folks didn't get it (for the library experience), or we didn't have the software tools we needed to make it happen, but we made little progress until just recently. This semester the university did a beta trial of a student portal, and over Easter break it was opened up to all students. The library had been consulted on our presence last year, and the subject librarians ranked databases and other content that students could pick. Then, as it came closer to going live, it sounded like we wouldn't have access to it right away (we weren't students, after all!) So our library tech folks made the case that we couldn't help students with library-related portal questions if we couldn't see what they were looking at, so we were given accounts. And I think we're using Google Analytics to get some good data on use. I don't have a good impression yet on how it's going over with students, but I think they'll be comfortable with using it.
Portals for library staff? I think I've pondered in other posts about coming up with a go-to place for my colleagues. We've had Outlook Public Folders, shared network folders, a commercial wiki, a staff presence in the Blackboard course management system. Now we're beginning to talk about Sharepoint, and our tech students are using it already. We need something to get people into the same shared space, which is something of an uphill battle (not all staff seem to be OK with email, for that matter.) We need some big nudges.
Showing posts with label My Yahoo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label My Yahoo. Show all posts
Friday, May 1, 2009
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Thing 13: Online Productivity Tools
Now, THIS is more like it! Here is a Thing that makes sense to me. We've been talking about user customization and portals at my library for some time, and now I get to see some portal-like things in action. I don't know that I'll convert to using one as my home page (I'm still not excited about sharing so much personal information etc. with a dot-com entity, and signing away my rights to my own information), but it's a very interesting concept.
Before making my choice, I looked at all three customized home page options: iGoogle, PageFlakes, and My Yahoo! Of the three, I had heard of iGoogle and My Yahoo before. I was least impressed with iGoogle: as a native St. Paulite, I was annoyed that iGoogle thought I was interested in Minneapolis! ;^) It's default news was from CNN - just not very "in touch" with me yet. My Yahoo knew I was from St. Paul, had St. Paul Pioneer Press news stories, and had weather information on the top (the weather is always important to Minnesotans - we know what it can do to us.) But the My Yahoo page design at my browser display required me to scroll across to see the entire screen, which I don't like (nothing like a "hey, can't you read this screen" reminder in your face.)
So I went with PageFlakes, the unknown quantity. It had the weather in the upper left (which I totally agree with.) It knew I was from St. Paul, and had St. Paul news stores (from the Strib, but that's life.) And it just felt better. So I spent too much time tweaking my settings. I could play with this a lot more, but I need to move on.
Online calendars: curiously, the link went to page 2 of the Wired magazine article about them. Google and Yahoo again - have I mentioned that I don't like to put all of my online eggs in one basket? I don't like the world according to Microsoft, so I don't think I'm going to give my life to Google just yet. (Personally, I use Ask.com for my web searching.) And while I have an email account with one of the big names (I think it's Yahoo), I don't use it. I'm still hoping that my personal tech person will get my old personal email account fixed, since we are paying for it and all.
We use Outlook Calendar at work, and while it has its quirks, I've gotten used to them. Back in the day, I could sync my handheld at work, and have my stuff in two places. But I lost that with the last computer upgrade. We rely on Outlook Calendar at work, and rely on it heavily for scheduling meetings, etc. My work calendar is too crucial to risk confusing it, and unfortunately I don't have time to maintain multiple calendars. However, I could see using one if you're scheduling people in multiple organizations, or for volunteer activities.
By the way, I do sync my handheld at home, and its "killer application" is the list feature. I have all of my lists there - books I've read, things to buy, ingredients for some of my favorite recipes, movies to watch/buy, clothes my daughter has/needs, etc., etc. It might be nice to use one of these productivity tools for that, BUT the way it is now, at least it's private.)
For the list options (Remember the Milk and Ta da List) - again, my handheld lists are my killer ap. I'm not ready to share them with the world yet. Although I can see the point of it in project management, event planning, etc.
Before making my choice, I looked at all three customized home page options: iGoogle, PageFlakes, and My Yahoo! Of the three, I had heard of iGoogle and My Yahoo before. I was least impressed with iGoogle: as a native St. Paulite, I was annoyed that iGoogle thought I was interested in Minneapolis! ;^) It's default news was from CNN - just not very "in touch" with me yet. My Yahoo knew I was from St. Paul, had St. Paul Pioneer Press news stories, and had weather information on the top (the weather is always important to Minnesotans - we know what it can do to us.) But the My Yahoo page design at my browser display required me to scroll across to see the entire screen, which I don't like (nothing like a "hey, can't you read this screen" reminder in your face.)
So I went with PageFlakes, the unknown quantity. It had the weather in the upper left (which I totally agree with.) It knew I was from St. Paul, and had St. Paul news stores (from the Strib, but that's life.) And it just felt better. So I spent too much time tweaking my settings. I could play with this a lot more, but I need to move on.
Online calendars: curiously, the link went to page 2 of the Wired magazine article about them. Google and Yahoo again - have I mentioned that I don't like to put all of my online eggs in one basket? I don't like the world according to Microsoft, so I don't think I'm going to give my life to Google just yet. (Personally, I use Ask.com for my web searching.) And while I have an email account with one of the big names (I think it's Yahoo), I don't use it. I'm still hoping that my personal tech person will get my old personal email account fixed, since we are paying for it and all.
We use Outlook Calendar at work, and while it has its quirks, I've gotten used to them. Back in the day, I could sync my handheld at work, and have my stuff in two places. But I lost that with the last computer upgrade. We rely on Outlook Calendar at work, and rely on it heavily for scheduling meetings, etc. My work calendar is too crucial to risk confusing it, and unfortunately I don't have time to maintain multiple calendars. However, I could see using one if you're scheduling people in multiple organizations, or for volunteer activities.
By the way, I do sync my handheld at home, and its "killer application" is the list feature. I have all of my lists there - books I've read, things to buy, ingredients for some of my favorite recipes, movies to watch/buy, clothes my daughter has/needs, etc., etc. It might be nice to use one of these productivity tools for that, BUT the way it is now, at least it's private.)
For the list options (Remember the Milk and Ta da List) - again, my handheld lists are my killer ap. I'm not ready to share them with the world yet. Although I can see the point of it in project management, event planning, etc.
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