What widgets do you have on your blog or in your learning content?

As I had difficulties to organize my own collection of links about widgets of interest to educators, I set up my own gallery:

widgets for education

(a widget is a very small piece of software doing *something*)

As this was started more than a year ago, I have a pretty good overview of the desktop widgets (the ones that live on your personal computer). But over the last months, there has been a total explosion of web widgets and I don't have them well covered.

If you are kind enough to add a comment with information about widgets that you have on your own blog or that you use in the context of your teaching activities, I will add them to the gallery (mass updates are easier -- they will take place at least once a week).

Tags: resources, widgets

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Permalink Reply by Laura Gibbs on October 17, 2007 at 8:50am

Hi Marielle, great widget collection - I love this stuff! I use a lot of widgets in our course management system, Desire2Learn, because it is completely sleep-inducing otherwise (very very tedious interface). It looks like I can find some nifty new widgets from your comprehensive listing: THANK YOU.

I use a really nifty tool called RotateContent.com which allows me to create date-based and random widgets with content specific to my classes and the kind of stuff I teach (mythology, folklore, Latin, religion, etc.) - you can see those widgets here; if only I had more time, I would make more of them - I made some new ones during the summer and am excited for winter holidays so that I can add a few more - here they are:
SchoolhouseWidgets.com

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Permalink Reply by Marielle Lange on October 17, 2007 at 10:23am

Thanks for the tip. Rotating content added. For now, I have archived the schoolhouse link to some other place because it is more about content than about tool. It's under assets :: text content in my personal wiki. There is a grand plan to design to integrate everything in one catalogue but that's another story, for later.

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Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on October 17, 2007 at 11:22am

Marielle,
We've got your gadget site up on the SmartBoard right now, and kids are showing each other the gadgets they'd like to put up on our class ning network. Pretty exciting stuff! Thank you for such a good resource!

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Permalink Reply by Marielle Lange on October 17, 2007 at 1:00pm

Note that some are desktop only (they will work on your whiteboard, but not within ning). If the widget is pretty cool, chances are high that a web version already exists. If not, well, there is always the opportunity for personalized widgets.

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Permalink Reply by John Larkin on October 17, 2007 at 6:41pm

Hi Marielle
A good question and excellent widgets that I can share with colleagues. I have been experimenting with a few widgets to determine their value. Most of them are for communication or 'broadcasting'. I have twitter on my blog. Some of my friends find twitter useful in that they can post a question and they receive a variety of responses in reasonably quick order. You need a reasonable number of foloowers for that to be useful. On my main page I have a Jaiku which takes in feeds from my various blogs, twitter, del.icio.us, flickr and live.fm accounts. The Jaiku ties everything together in one place and acts as a sort of 'What's New' for my site although the feeds are slow coming through sometimes.
As my students set up blogs I will add their feeds to a dedicated Jaiku widget as well as a Google Reader account in order to easily monitor their contributions.
Last night I added customised blogrolls to my blog using Google Reader. Not exactly a widget. It is very useful. I do not need to update my links to other blogs. This is done automatically as you add and delete the blogs that you read within Google Reader. I have posted about that here. You can place the blogs that you read in different folders that are tagged and the blogrolls on your site will reflect that categorisation. You may have a web site for a specific subject or faculty area. You could categorise the blogs that you monitor in Google Reader and the specific blog rolls would reflect that blog sites that you consider valuable. Others can download the list easily via the embedded OPML file available as a link with the blogroll.
Best wishes
John Larkin

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Permalink Reply by Marielle Lange on October 26, 2007 at 10:42am

Been off a network connection for a few days. Many good points on the fact that this is not all about widgets but also web services. I have tried to accommodate for that in the widgets gallery. There is now a clear separation between

desktop widgets: small applications that live on your personal computer and are highly specialized in doing one thing
web widgets: small objects that you embed on a personal webpage and that display content, information or services,
web services: websites you go to in order to benefit from a service. The service can be an online application to create and share content (fotoflexer, an image editing solution, is an example). It can be a classroom or community management system (ning is a good example). It can be a community of users, where information or assets get shared (youTube is an example).

I have added about 10 items falling mostly into the web widgets and web services categories. Check them out in the widgets gallery.

I will add all the ones you mention, which are of more generic (not strictly education) on the next update.

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Permalink Reply by Hans Feldmeier on October 26, 2007 at 11:03am

Hi Marielle, as to widgets: I think a voki could be nice!
Check out one of my blogs e-competences
Greetings
Hans

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Permalink Reply by Marielle Lange on October 26, 2007 at 11:37am

It was in the list, but obviously not visible enough. I have added a link all web widgets. Various disruptions for the last 5-10 min. Everything back to normal now.