Our adventure exploring Protopages and Netvibes has been my least favorite of activities in this course. One could argue that I am the least familiar with the aggregated website tools we used, however, I feel like I will never use these two again. Nonetheless, I battled through.
I added all of the required components for my protopage, but I was extremely disappointed to learn my YouTube Channel, playlist and our class Wiki will not embed in a graphically pleasing manner without advanced knowledge of code. They appear as white boxes with only a link up top. This reminded of a time when I was trying to learn about Blendspace, a tool that seemed to have put a number of resources together in a single space for students to access. I looked it up and found that the name has changed a bit. It is now called TesTeach. Their site says, "These days, the ability to pull together your own learning content, free online resources as well as commercial content and blend it into one comprehensive lesson has become an essential skill for modern teaching." Even though this isn't the tool used this week, I believe is does align with what I think the heart of aggregated sites are. Blendspace is also drag and drop, a definite improvement on the two shared this week. Personally, I think widgets have to be graphically appealing if you want people, especially students, to use and interact with them. My adventure in aggregated pages this week left me disappointed, wanted more and thinking there's a better (or easier) way to curate this material. Since I already use a website for my teaching, I would probably be more apt to use embed codes to share information with students.
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