Widgets

Widget Examples

Google Custom Search

If you have a Google Account, you can build a custom search engine and embed the code for it on a Wiki. This is helpful in a variety of ways. It helps you to limit the responses that come up if a student searches for something. For example, if you teach a course with some sensitive subject matter, creating a custom search engine will allow students to search without having to worry about getting some "interesting" responses. This is also helpful because it allows you to narrow the search to a set number of good sites for your students to search. Here is an example custom search engine set up to search through key sites in the grading reform discussions of today (O'Connor, Reeves, etc...).

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Below is video on how to develop a custom search engine. The embedding process he describes is for Blackboard, but it is similar to Wikispaces.

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Youtube Videos

Embedding videos from Youtube is also fairly straight forward: you simply need to insert a Widget and paste the HTML code from the Youtube video in the Widget tool. The above video on creating Google Custom Search engines was embedded from Youtube.



History Channel, Discovery Channel, Teacher Tube, Foxnews, Other Videos...

The History Channel has many videos that you can embed if you get the HTML code. The process for that on the History Channel is shown in the image below, along with an example video (an introduction to a series on Vietnam).

Many other websites allow you to embed videos from their website. Usually, you will want to look for a button that says "Share" then look for a link that says "Embed" or "HTML Code." Remember, when you are embedding a video you are essentially creating a link to the website in your Wiki which can be viewed in your Wiki. Therefore, if the link changes, the video is removed, or there are some advertisements before the video, those all will influence how and/or if your video plays.

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Timelines

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Quizzes

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Examples of other items that can be embedded...

Embeded videos, widgets, links, sound, pictures, Glogster, Wordle, Tag Clouds, Google Sketch Up Models of the Brain, Google Custom Search Engines, Qwiki, Tagxedo, Quizlet links, embedded quizzes, Timelines, Surveys, Polls, etc…

For more information... Online Tools - Various Widgets Other Wikis - Wiki page with links to other Wikis