It's pretty, things move around easily, it has gadgets for tracking or displaying anything one can think of, and a thousand things you never considered wanting to keep on your homepage for daily viewing. Who wouldn't want one of these?
Then I remembered - I haven't found these types of things particularly useful in the past. I had a My Yahoo page for a decade, and in the past year have given up checking it. Despite the edition of RSS feeds to my favorite blogs, Daily Pictures, weather and more, it had become the place I went to to find out if I had mail. And I stopped using my Yahoo mail account due to the overwhelming spam that came to the inbox after 10+ years of distributing that email address across cyberspace.To be fair to iGoogle, their variety of gadgets alone makes this page a dozen times more interesting already then the quickly forgotten My Yahoo, yet it still seems as though in the effort to consolidate, to expedite the browsing process, we go looking for more to distract us. Do I really need the "Art of the Day" gadget? No, but it makes my page look pretty and I feel like I'm learning something by being exposed to it. Yet, as I go to my iGoogle page to get the day's headlines, check my email and the weather, I look right past it - it's already become background noise.
As someone who has a life with so many facets that it can often seem chaotic, I have mixed feelings about these pages. I love them for their opportunity, their hope that in one page I can find simplicity, all of my daily needs presented to me in one quick location. Show me which of the blogs I track have new posts, show me my calendar, my to-do list, show me the day's headlines, what's the teaching tip of the day? Great. All in one place, easy to find, a good use of technology to simplify life and give each day a starting point. But does it really help keep it all organized? Couldn't I just set up Bookmarks in Firefox for my favorite sites, my mail, and the MySOU page that's supposed to help me keep all things school-related together? How would this help me find new information for teaching any better than just doing a Google search when I have ideas that need more research?
So I explored the idea of the tabs. Not a new idea by any means. Look at that first screenshot again, I have a dozen tabs open already. Again, why not just use my browser to help me keep things organized? Okay, iGoogle, what have you got that's going to impress me? I started to break out the items into tabs: items that are relevant to the student-me on tab 2; news and headlines from around the world on tab 3 for when I have time to explore the world beyond work or school. I even created a "Science and Teaching" tab, then used Google's famous "I'm feeling lucky" button to let it select gadgets for me.
That's when I started to get hooked. This might be different enough that I can get excited about it. I started out thinking "it's all too much, I'll forget to check it, get bored with it." Now, I'm excited. Look! Headlines from a dozen different good science and teaching sites. Updated every day with something new! I don't need to go browse those sites, I can read their headlines and go from there. Clean, neat. Organized by topic and relevancy. This I can get excited about. New ideas, topics, discussions. Things that help me learn more and that I can apply in the classroom to help my students - all easy to find thanks to iGoogle. And that's what makes this a step above bookmarks and browser tabs - as the sites update, so do the gadgets on these pages. I don't have to go looking for what's new at Discover Channel or ScienceNOW, it updates here for me to see, and in just a quick click I can read more. That's where this becomes a time-saver and innovative tool in broadening my daily browsing into a daily dose of research. And that's what teaching and learning is - a daily exposure to new things and using that information to learn more.
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