Staying organized

I’ve used a number of utilities like this over the years. It’s a handy way to keep track of online resources that I use frequently. A long time ago, I even created one for the school district and it was called the Student Reference Portal. I had the IT Department make it the default page for the browsers.

Essentially, it’s a collection of important and frequently referenced links. If you’ve ever witnessed the frustration of watching students type a URL, you’ll immediately see the value.

And, more importantly, you can’t expect students to “Google” everything that they want to use on the internet. That doesn’t teach them much and there’s no guarantee that they’re going to end up where you want them to. Then, there’s the whole misinformation / literacy piece.

I played around with my latest find in this genre of resources this morning. It’s called Papaly.

You can create your own account and start getting organized or just play around with this tutorial offering.

The authors have taken a “card” approach to the layout. This means that you can pick up any of the cards and rearrange them to meet your need. When you start from scratch, you’ll have nothing but quickly can add your own links or import your bookmarks.

You’d populate the board with cards and enclosed links of your own and then leave this in a tab or make the link to your board the default for your browser.

If you’re going to start somewhere, you might as well start somewhere immediately usable. We all have our browsing routine. With a service like this, you can facilitate it by baking it right in.