MyClusta & Tizmos

I know there are a variety of different tools out there that allow you to create your own personalized start pages (I currently am using PageFlakes for this purpose) but there are a few new ones I recently read about on Paul Hamilton's great blog that I wanted to pass along. MyClusta and Tizmos allow you to create your own start page with the sites you visit most often represented visually as thumbnails, screenshots or some other logical image. These are both different from an RSS feed reader in that you don't have to pick just sites that are generating a feed but instead the sites you like to visit often or that you use frequently with your students. Tizmos provides a screenshot, updated every couple of days, for each website you choose to include while MyClusta allows you to pick your own image for each website if you so desire. Essentially, these tools let you take a favorite list of websites and represent them visually on a single page as shown in the screenshots below.

From MyClusta:
And from Tizmos:

ShareTabs

ShareTabs is one of those tools that is very simple to use and implement in the classroom. As the name implies, ShareTabs allows you to share a series of URLs as tabs with your students. You pick the sites you want to share and the tabs are created for you. You then are given a link to these tabs that you can provide to your students and by sharing just this one link you end up sharing all the tabs associated with that link. It really is just that easy. Check out http://sharetabs.com/?searchengines to see an example. I think this tool would be particularly helpful in an elementary setting where it will often times be easier to provide students with a single link rather than walking them through the process of opening several tabs in a browser and navigating to multiple sites. I have a hard enough time explaining that process to my dad...hope he isn't reading this.