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.
Doug, this looks really interesting! Can you easily share the collection with others? I used collections like this in the past when I taught Grades 1-6 for students to access resources they needed for different subject areas and/or projects. I need to check this one out more.
Aviva
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Hi Aviva – thanks for your thoughts. You can always share the URL with others. An interesting feature here that I probably should have included in the post is that you can have a “co-owner”.
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The first web page I created myself was just a bunch of links to sites I used often. This was before browsers had things like favorites or saved recent links for you any other way. If fact this was most people’s home page. No search engines back then either.
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It wouldn’t let me test the site out without creating an account (it gave me an error) so I went looking for review videos and found this one:
My first thought is that it’s just duplicating links that I have in my bookmarks, albeit in a much nicer presentation. This makes me wonder if there’s a tool out there that will take your bookmarks and convert it to a page (or pages) similar to Papaly’s look and feel. Perhaps Alfred will code this for us…
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I need to try something like this. Thanks for the idea!
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