One of the things being pushed quite heavily for our projects is the use of gadgets, aka web widgets, which are self-contained mini apps you can embed into web pages.
Until widgets came along the only ways to add third-party content to your site was to directly install all the files onto your server and set it up manually, or use something called an iframe, which comes with a bunch of restrictions.
Now it's possible to 'install' an app on your site just by copying a tiny piece of code into your markup and everything else is taken care of for you. All sorts of widgets exist, from clocks and calendars, to stock market tickers and social media plug-ins.
Widgets offer a way for non-techies to add relatively complex functionality to their pages and let you integrate a bunch of services for very little effort. They're pretty neat. Here's a list of some popular ones, and here's a longer list. The thing you'll notice is they are all quite 'mainstream', with little in the way of niche gadgets for niche uses (local shop for local people!).
The pitfall I was determined to avoid was the risk of adding gadgets here, there and everywhere just because they exist, as we've seen time and again on everything from Geocities to every social media platform ever. I wanted to only relevant utility to be added, with no fluff and no shoehorning. If I add it it's because it serves some useful purpose that furthers the aims of the lesson, not to tick some boxes.
The pitfall I was determined to avoid was the risk of adding gadgets here, there and everywhere just because they exist, as we've seen time and again on everything from Geocities to every social media platform ever. I wanted to only relevant utility to be added, with no fluff and no shoehorning. If I add it it's because it serves some useful purpose that furthers the aims of the lesson, not to tick some boxes.
That means, aside from a standard forum and contact links to social platforms that make sense, I've eschewed all the social media add-ins that get plastered over every blog in an attempt to relevantise their site. Nope, not here. Facebook, Twitter et al have their purpose, even in education, but for a module with a strong technical bias they are frivolous and a distraction at best. I've also avoided those ephemeral gadgets - the ones that tend to get ignored after an initial glance - such as word searches and tag clouds. I'v written about their relevance to the subjects I teach before, but to reiterate: I see little value in them for the types of learners this module is aimed at.
Google's implementation of widgets they call gadgets, presumably as the platform is heavily sandboxed for security, and has a reasonable number built in with varying levels of quality. Many didn't work. I struggled to find widgets on other sites that were usefully related to the subject, so I had a go at making a couple of my own with mixed results - an adaptation of the Skype button code made following instructions didn't want to work at all, yet a completely bespoke gadget loaded up without problems.
In the end I found myself using the older iframe method for a lot of my in-page tools as it worked more consistently (even then not always), but in doing so I had to sacrifice a lot of the tight integration I was trying to implement.
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