Teaching Tools on Your Time

Resources for Moodle: Widgets

What are widgets, you ask? Basically, they are easily embeddable frames of content that you can add to your personal website to provide enhanced functionality. The best example of an embedded widget is a Youtube video embedded onto your page.

Widgets are a great way to enhance your Moodle pages. Become a Moodle super-user by considering adding some of the Widgets below to your website.

Embed Images or Slideshows

• Slideshare - Easily embed Slideshare widgets so students have instant access to your presentation in Moodle.
• My Brainshark - Create an account with My Brainshark to upload PowerPoints and then add your own narration to the slides. Embed these audio slides onto your Moodle account.
• Zoom.it - With Zoom.it, you can create a widget that lets students interact with a large-scale image, such as a high-resolution scan of an artwork. You can zoom in to focus on certain sections of the image.
• AuthorShare - Upload PowerPoints to AuthorStream and convert them to interactive Flash videos

Embed Video

• Youtube - The standard video-hosting site. Upload your own video, or choose from existing videos to add to your page.
• Vimeo - The National Cathedral School uses Vimeo to embed video because of the high definition quality of the videos, as well as the fact that videos with Youtube need to be under ten minutes. Videos up to one GB large can be uploaded with Vimeo.

Embed Polls

• Flisti - Create a free online poll and embed it onto your Moodle site for students to easily access it.
• Poll Everywhere - This is what the NCS Library uses to conduct polls. Embed a widget on your site to allow users to vote directly on your page. Users can also vote via text message through this service.
• Answer Garden - An incredibly easy service to ask a question and gather a variety of responses.
• Forms on Google Docs - Create a form with your Google Doc account and embed it into your website easily.
• Pollmo - Another free service to let you easily create and embed a poll without an account.

Embed Documents

• Embedit.in - Embed documents, such as Word documents and PDFs directly onto your webpage.
• Good Noows - This reader has a sleek interface, allowing you to access your feed subscriptions in a unique way.