Heidi Olson

A widget (or badge) is a small application that runs on your desktop, on your mobile unit or that gets embedded in a website. It often will display information that is pulled from a source or from many sources that gets regularly updated. Weather widgets are very popular to see what current conditions are like where you live or for where you like to vacation. Stock Market tickers, count-downs, news, games – someone has created a visual widget for just about everything out there. According to Widgetbox.com, the most popular downloaded widget on their site is Super Mario Game.

PBS has created some “Teachers Activity Packs which look like they feature ideas for activities as well as provide links to resources.

Here’s a short video about Adding Widgets to Blackboard.

I would caution you about getting too carried away with adding widgets to your site. They might take up a lot of screen real estate, they might slow down the speed in which the site is loaded, and they might not really be that useful for your students. You might consider including a pertinent widget for a weekly topic and then taking it down. If they student found it interesting they could always go out and get it for themselves and place it on their myUA page, their google home page or other social networking site.

Ever wonder who is reading your blog? I ran across this widget that you can load into your blog’s sidebar that shows where your readers are coming from and how they got there. Often your blog might be linked from another blog or website. Its always interesting to see how people got to your site.

This widget is called Feedjit. With Feedjit you can see:

• Which city and country your visitors are in
• Which website they arrived from, if any
• Which page they visited on your website
• Which external link they clicked to leave your site, if any

It gives you to option of using a live traffic feed or a live traffic map. If you use blogger or typepad you can quickly add it to your sidebar. If you are using another platform, Feedjit says:

If you use a different platform or if you’re installing Feedjit in a website, then simply cut and paste the script we provide into your blog template or website HTML. Feedjit will appear in the position you paste the script.

They also say that if you’re using a free account from wordpress.com then you won’t be able to use feedjit. If you have your own installation of wordpress you can modify your template with their code and add it to your site.

If your visitors don’t want to be seen there is an option link that they can click and remove themselves from your list.

Here’s what it looks like on my personal blog: