Classroom webpages are great for students and parents as they can be a window into your classroom. A classroom site can be a great place for teachers to showcase student work, post announcements, and link to instructional resources.
Visitors to a classroom site may expect frequent updates to the content. Unfortunately, most classroom teachers do not have the time to regularly update their sites. Visitors may also want interactive content and that is not something teachers can easily create themselves.
Web widgets, little bits of code you embed into the HTML of a webpage, are useful for posting instructional resources and self-updating information. Once a web widget is placed on a site, it can grab updated information and display it on a webpage–all automatically. Unlike widgets for Protopage, Macintosh Dashboard, and Yahoo, web widgets are embedded on any webpage, blog, wiki, or social networking homepage because they do not require you to use a certain service or platform.
Let’s look at some example widgets and then see how to put them into a webpage:
| Dictionary.com Word of the Day | |
| Funology Daily Jokes and Riddles |  |
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You can also embed YouTube videos, but those are often blocked by school filters. |
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Specify any MP3s on the web to play inside the widget. |
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Instant translation of your page into another language. |
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Put any news feed in a widget. |
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Upload your own photos to display them on your site. |
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Google has a wide selection of widgets, which they call gadgets. The example is a game. |
Web widgets are a great way for educators to bring fresh content and/or interactivity to their pages. So how do you get a widget onto your webpage? The services that power the above widgets offer small chunks of code that you copy and paste into your webpage or blog. All of the widgets above are free of charge. However, many services required me to set up an account in order to access the code.
I placed the above widgets into this page by copying the HTML code from the source site. For example, here’s the code to embed the Word of the Day widget:
<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" width="250" height="180" id="wordoftheday_widget" align="middle"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /><param name="movie" value="http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/widget/wotd_widget.swf?r=74&skin=" /><param name="loop" value="false" /><param name="menu" value="false" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<embed src="http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/widget/wotd_widget.swf?r=74&skin=" loop="false" menu="false" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="250" height="180" name="wordoftheday_widget" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="allow" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /></object>
The code looks complicated, but don’t worry. All you do is select the entire code and copy it. Then pick the spot in your web page or blog and paste it. You do need to make sure your web editor is in HTML mode (not Rich Text or WYSIWYG modes).
Robin Good has a five-part series of short videos about web widgets. He tells you what widgets are, how to get them, and which ones are his favorites. Robin focuses on adding widgets to blogs; however, the same technique can be used for non-blog websites as well.
Doina Popovici has a three-minute video that shows how to embed a TeacherTube video into your website. She uses Dreamweaver for her web editor. The process for embedding other widgets is very similar to what Doina shows.
Your classroom webpage can be more interactive and automatically updated with content using web widgets. Though there are thousands of widgets to choose from, it’s important to remember that you can have too much of a good thing. The more widgets on a page, the more cluttered the page becomes and the longer that page will take to load. Browse the list of web widgets below to find objects to freshen up your website!
- Match Up Word Game – Practice vocabulary
- Poll Daddy – Take a poll
- MyStudiyo – Make multiple quizzes
- TinyChat – Instantly add a chat room to your website
- Widgipedia – Directory with hundreds of web widgets
- Tony Vincent’s online bookmarks tagged web widget
Tags: by Tony Vincent
