iGoogle: personalized home page with immediate access to your favorite resources
Ninth grade students in all social studies classes have set up iGoogle pages. They can add:
Þ Teacher calendars (if RSS feed available)
Þ Resource widgets (search boxes to credible sources)
Þ Current Events
Þ Personalized themes and other gadgets
Þ Calendar
Þ Task/To-Do Widget
iGoogle is a great tool to organize and locate important information. No longer are students interested in visiting a bunch of different websites to find one piece of information. Students prefer technology customized to fit their needs. iGoogle allows students to customize their needs and integrate teacher calendars, library resources, and other organizational tools.
iGoogle: personalized home page with immediate access to your favorite resources
Google recently launched iGoogle. iGoogle allows users to set up a page with “widget or gadgets” sitting on the page that directly link to favorite sources. These gadgets deliver content directly to the page. For example, add a weather gadget and each time you open your iGoogle page, you will see the current weather and three day forecast.
In addition, content from your favorite news sources will be delivered to the page. Other gadgets include, interactive to-do list, calendar, online dictionary, and word of the day.
How can this be used with students? Students can create individual iGoogle pages linking to content helpful for your class. This page can become a meaningful information source for students.
In addition, you can create a gadget so that your information is “pushed” to the students’ iGoogle pages.
For more information about creating a gadget, see the library newsletter blog (bvwlibrary.edublogs.org).
iGoogle Gadgets for West:
BVW Passwords: list of passwords for all library databases
BVW One-Liners: first lines of books in the library, updated each day
