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 Create Your Virtual Desktop
Personal start pages are designed to be the "home page" for all of your work and serve as your gateway into the internet. They allow users to set up which tools and gadgets they want to have on their start page. Useful tools such as email, calendars, stickies, bookmarks, news and research devices can all be centralized onto one page which can be viewed from any workstation. For students this is a great way to mangage their research and share what they are doing. A teacher can even populate a start page with specific tools and resources and then send it out for students to use.
There are now dozens of provider choices for your personal start page we will look at three of the more popular ones.
iGoogle - once again Google provides tons of gadgets and tools which are very easy to manage and set up. Their collaboration and research tools are great for the classroom and also sharing ideas with colleagues. Thousands of choices of widgets like calendars, calculators, translators, news, to do lists and many more are ripe for the picking. The only problem is that with so many exciting choices your "virtual desktop" can get as cluttered as your real desktop. You need to have a Google account to create your personal page, which is free of course.
Protopage - a great start up page with many choices and a simple drag and drop function which makes it more like your desktop than a website. You can also view websites without leaving your start page and link other webmail such as gmail to your start page
Netvibes- another great choice that also uses the drag and drop function for creating your start page. It has a very clean look and lets you organize content into tabbed pages which keeps it from getting too cluttered. They also offer links to email and an array of widgets and personal options for displaying your page plus links for many email providers.
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