Since my post about Start Pages, I have been looking at different features of an assortment of web two-point-oh start page sites. Pageflakes has added a “student” version of a start page.
The Pageflakes people have taken many of the widgets that are applicable to an educational environment and consolidated them into a nice template. From the template a student can add a class schedule, enter grades from different courses and search for a job. The Google search has been adjusted to target books and scholarly searches. The rest of the page has standard items like a calendar and to-do-list. These would benefit a student as much as anyone else.
I still haven’t decided to switch from Protopage as my main start page. I have accounts on all the major sites. I’ve trimmed the number of feeds from my Protopage and it seems to be loading quicker. The testing continues…