PortaPortal
Wes Fryer has a post about a bookmarking tool called PortaPortal. Some folks in my school district have also looked at this tool and I am having a hard time understanding why they find it so interesting. Here you have a tool that does not support RSS, does not even have a bookmarklet for teachers to use to add sites. The process for adding sites is cumbersome, and you can’t add any descriptive information about the sites that you are pointing people to. Finally, the site looks like it is stuck in some 1997 web site time warp. I mean, come on, look at those goofy buttons. 
If I’m using a tool for bookmarks to share with my students and staff, I’m going to use something that supports RSS and that I can hook into my browser. For example at Lewis Elementary we use tools such as Furl and del.icio.us (we could very easily use open source bookmarking tools too…) to organize websites that teachers are pointing students to. Because these tools utilize RSS we can easily bake the links/RSS feeds from the various tools into Live Bookmarks in Firefox. We also take advantage of Firefox and GreaseMonkey and have built the del.icio.us tag tool into the browser toolbar to make it easy for teachers to tag the sites they want. Once you have folks using social bookmaking tools that support RSS you have many options in how you share the content. For example we can use the built in aggregator in Drupal (our web site CMS..) to create custom teacher and content specific pages based on RSS feeds of individual tags. Until PortaPortal takes advantage of RSS I can’t see much use for it.
September 28th, 2006 17:19
the truth finally comes out!
September 29th, 2006 09:25
Hi, I work at a high school and am in charge of the computer labs, as well as assisting to help teachers take on more uses of technology in education. I’m new to the job and have a lot of knowledge about the sort of applications you talk about on your blog.
what strategies did you use to help teachers adopt things like del.icio.us, google maps, etc. in their curriculum? I would also like to promote the use of the computer lab in curriculum.
thank you for the advice
October 2nd, 2006 13:23
These clunky “portal” / linkfest / linkatorium things have been around since I started building websites in ‘99. I only read this because it’s the second reference to PortaPortal I find in as many days, the other one a recommendation to somebody looking for a folder-based bookmarking system. I think about managing that hierarchy of folders and subfolders, and all of the decisions that must be made about classifying links, and my head hurts. My thinking (now) would be to generate links to specific tags in Scuttle/del.icio.us/etc. and let users explore the related tags from there.
Some people just love folders, I guess.
October 4th, 2006 16:37
I like the fact that you are actually using the tools with your staff, instead of talking and looking for new ones. I am finding with Web 2.0 there is an abundance of tools that all do the same thing. We just have to make sure it does the things we need for our educators and students.
November 21st, 2006 18:50
I am a fan of Portaportal (as Melissa know!)
The listing format of Furl and Del.i.cious does not work as well cognitively with students nor my colleagues.
When I share Portaportal links and the VERY simple “how-tos” with colleagues and at conferences (even with uber-techies like you) folks love it. I get undeserved fan mail for having shared it.
I am a big tech user but love the elegant simplicity of Portaportal for my K-5 students. Nothing beats adding a “smile-y” next to a URL for a non-reading Kindergartener to find it quickly for one class period (it’s super easy and fast to add/delete those icons.)
Delicio.us and Furl and the other RSS fed web-based bookmarking tools don’t work for my students.
1-2 years ago I emailed the Portaportal folks quite a bit asking for RSS-feed capabilities but dropped the ball…