Start Me Up!

Starter Pages can be a powerful tool for Students with Disabilities. With a starter page and knowledge of RSS feeds students can have information organized and ready to be viewed. Starter pages can contain todo list, widgets, and an easy way to navigate to where students need to go. Below are some links and some ideas of how to use Starter Pages.

Netvibes - Netvibes is a starter page that can be shared or made public.  Your personalized page can be accessed from any computer or mobile device. This could be beneficial because a student could be subscribed to certain feeds and be organized by having  feeds and widgets available: Example: online calendar to put assignments on; calculator for math class;. Page also has tabs to be organized and has tabs that can be color coded.

Protopage -  Another starter page similar to netvibes.  Offers the same services although seems to be less complex than the netvibes. Great way to organize information for students.

Igoogle -  Igoogle is a great  personal starter page. I actually use this has my personal starter page. Igoogle contains all of the features of widgets, RSS feeds, calendar function.  Igoogle has various themes that one can choose to personalize their page or also has the Tab functions to help better organize your information. The main difference is that the Igoogle page is incorporated with a Gmail account. Anytime that one uses an igoogle page their gmail  e-mail account will show up on the page. This would best be used for a students personal page but not necessarily a starter page for a class.

MyYahoo - My.yahoo.com and igoogle offer many of  the same starter services. Yahoo like igoogle displays mail preview in the starter page. My.yahoo also offers the use of widgets, and to subscribe to RSS feeds. One of the main differences is that the MyYahoo page uses the Yahoo Search Engine where igoogle uses the Google search engine.