Pageflakes Brings Web 2.0 to the Classroom

Pagecasting an Effective Teaching and Learning Tool

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Pageflakes (www.pageflakes.com), the community-driven personalized homepage, today announced that over 1,000 schools around the world are using Pageflakes to teach important skills, increase student-teacher interaction, and make learning fun. Teachers and students in K - 12, colleges and other learning institutions have found it fast and easy to set up an online learning environment using Pageflakes, without any programming skills and at no cost. Using Pageflakes, educators arrange “Flakes” - small, movable versions of popular web sites, interactive research tools, and education-specific applications – on a customized web page. Educators can then use Pageflakes’ innovative Pagecasting capability to easily share the page privately with their students, classes and administrators, or publish it to the web so anyone can see it.

“We envisioned Pageflakes being the cornerstone of our School 2.0 initiative”

“We envisioned Pageflakes being the cornerstone of our School 2.0 initiative,” said John Calvert, a teacher in the Tarrytown, New York public school district. “Teachers can use Pageflakes to keep track of student blogs, collect research and news that supports what is happening in the classroom and will enable students to harness the vast wealth of information on the Internet. In addition, these new media literacies will be critical skills for the future workplace.”

As a result of its popularity among teaching professionals, Pageflakes has worked with educators to develop multiuser Flakes specifically for the classroom environment, including a Grade Tracker, Class Schedule, To-Do-List, Message Board, Class Blog and Class Calendar, in addition to popular online reference tools such as Wikipedia and a dictionary. Hundreds of thousands of other Flakes and RSS feeds are also available for news, special interests, educator blogs and resources, document storage, photos, videos, and much more, enabling teachers and students to create a shared education-oriented web site for virtually any subject, learning topic or educational community.

“Pageflakes pioneered the community-driven personalized homepage, so we’re thrilled that teachers and students are using Pageflakes in the classroom and beyond,” said Dan Cohen, CEO of Pageflakes. “Pageflakes is enabling educators around the world to teach and interact with their students and with each other to enrich the learning experience, without the need for technical skills or for a technology budget.”

The company offers extensive resources specifically for the education community, including a special version of its site, student.pageflakes.com, that makes it easy to get started with Pageflakes in an educational setting. Additional education-oriented Flakes, news feeds and audio podcasts can be located in the Pageflakes community gallery at http://www.pageflakes.com/Community, in addition to public Pagecasts and templates that have been created by Pageflakes’ users to aid in the creation of new educational pages.

• Flakes: http://www.pageflakes.com/Community/Content/flakes.aspx?Search =students
• RSS News Feeds: http://www.pageflakes.com/Community/Content/Feeds.aspx?Search= student
• Templates: http://www.pageflakes.com/Community/Content/Template.aspx?Sear ch=student
• Public Pagecasts: http://www.pageflakes.com/Community/Pages/Page.aspx?Search=edu cation

(Due to their length, these URLs may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)

The following are examples of Pageflakes pages created by educators:

• Onsted High School (MI, USA): http://www.pageflakes.com/akharsh
• Freehold Regional High School District (NJ, USA): http://www.pageflakes.com/sullivanbio
• East Lothian School District (Scotland): http://www.pageflakes.com/edubuzz
• Bellaire Primary School (Australia): http://www.pageflakes.com/jpearce
• Aston Fields Middle School (UK): http://www.pageflakes.com/rcharles

About Pageflakes

Pageflakes, the community-driven personalized homepage, is revolutionizing how we how we start with and use the Internet. At www.pageflakes.com, you can easily customize the Internet and make it yours using ”Flakes” – small, movable versions of all of your Web favorites that you can arrange on your personal homepage. Flakes are available for thousands of uses and interests, including news, sports, e-mail, local events, search, photos, music, videos – even interactive tools like a calendar and a to-do list – and just about anything else you do on the Web at school, work and at home. Pageflakes’ innovative Pagecasting capability allows you to easily share your page with a private group or publish it to the web for the world to see. The Pageflakes community of users create and help each other discover more new Flakes and create new Pagecasts every day.

Pageflakes was founded in Germany in 2006 and is funded by Benchmark Capital.