I created this short video (about 7 minutes) as an introduction to using Netvibes as a personal homepage for educators and students. Aside from the ease of user, there are two reasons why I think Netvibes is a particularly elegant solution:
1. Registration - unlike many Web 2.0 sites which require users to create a new account which send a verification email to the user, Netvibes lets you create an account and begin work right away. You do get an email, but you are not required to verify it before using Netvibes. Of course, there are some issues surrounding this, but given how difficult it often is to have students checking email (e.g. loggin in via webmail, forgetting passwords, etc) I think that this works wonderfully because you can create an account instantly and begin working.
2. Tab Sharing - Tab sharing allows teachers to create a custom tab (for a class, a unit or even a particular lesson) and then publish that tab to the netvibes ecosystem . From there students can login to their netvibes page and then subscribe to that tab. I've done just that on the right side of my blog ====> in that I created a tab with the 20 or so edtech blogs are read most days. If you have a netvibes account all you have to do is click on the button and the tab will be added to your page.
These two features make Netvibes an especially atractive tool for the classroom. A teacher can create a tab filled with instructional content, links, pages, and collaborative spaces, while still allowing students to have their own netvibes page filled with all the "other content" they want. As an added benefit, if students have a block such as MySpace on their netvibes page and MySpace is blocked by the school, that block won't show up - but the netvibes page will. It makes for a nice system where students can still get to some content, but not necessarily all.
