4. Merlot

MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy.   MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.

MERLOT's strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty designed courses.

MERLOT’s activities are based on the creative collaboration and support of its Individual Members, 
Institutional Partners, Corporate Partners and Editorial Boards. 

Integral to MERLOT’s continuing development of faculty development support services are its:

•       Building and sustaining online academic communities

•       Online teaching and learning initiatives

•       Building, organizing, reviewing, and developing applications of online teaching-learning materials

MERLOT maintains its currency through ongoing and continuing communication with its worldwide supporters in a variety of ways, including the annual MERLOT International Conference, the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT), member publications, news, and our new Voices website to enable MERLOT users to communication with others.

Source: http://taste.merlot.org/

d St� P g @ X� . Widgets can also add productivity and/or fun to your start page. A common example of a widget on a start page are RSS readers used to deliver the headlines from your favorite blog or news source such as Yahoo! News or CNN.

·         Social Networking Profiles. You can use widgets on a Social Network to tell more about yourself, such as listing out your favorite books, or have compile your favorite songs into a play list to play for visitors to your profile.

To use a web widget, you must copy the widget code to your website, blog, start page or social networking profile. Some widget galleries help out by automating this process for you.

Source: http://webtrends.about.com/od/widgets/a/widget_guide.htm