Alan Levine posts about Inward / Outward Aggregating. He points to tools such as SuprGlu, which allow you to create a public page that aggregates content from a variety of sources. He also points to Google's personalized home pages, Google IG. While Google has allowed you to add content to these personalized pages from a variety of sources, including RSS feeds, news sites, and your GMail account, today Alan pointed out something I hadn't seen, Google Modules. Google Modules give one the ability to add other types of content to your Google page. Examples include maps, images, to-do lists, and all sorts of other widget like tools. There is an API that outlines how to do this.
What I see as interesting would be for a school district to take this personalized Google page and provide XML data or modules/widgets that would tie this type of page into its existing data silos. For example as a principal I would like a personalized page that pulled in content such as my school's average daily attendance; a daily listing of absent and tardy students; GPS routing information for our school busses (this one is really a bit of a dream... long post someday... ); a list of the most current student reading assessment scores; staff that have called off or out of the building... Basically all the little bits of data that a school district collects, and I need to do my work. The availability of tools such as Google IG hooked with data from our district would make for one interesting and valuable tool for teachers, students and administrators.
Technorati Tags: Alan Levine, Google IG, SuprGlu