If you look closely at any class or student blog you’ll see things like calendars, clocks, videos, quizzes, polls and visitor tracking widgets added widgets in sidebars because they grab attention and creating opportunities for interaction or learning.
The purpose of this blog is to showcase the most popular widgets that educators, and their students, like to add to their sidebar.
The popular widgets
The most popular widgets used on class and student blogs have been added to the left and right sidebars so you can check out them all in one location.
Remember this is a Demo Blog!
We’ve gone a bit widget crazy to help you see them all in the one location and you generally don’t see all these widgets together on a class blog.
Intro to widgets
The term widget refers to any tool or content that you add, arrange or remove from the sidebar(s) of your blog — these are the blocks that make up your sidebar.
Widgets are used for a wide range of purposes including:
- Help students, parents and visitors find information on the blog e.g. Search widget, pages widget, category widget, tag widget
- Track visitors to the blog. Visitor tracking widgets are used to highlight a blog’s global audience. This can be incredibly motivating for students and provides a built in geography lesson – Flag Counter, Feedjit Live Traffic Feed, ClustrMaps, Revolver Map.
- Engage students – Brainpop, Pet widget, Wonderopolis
- Information to help other classes learn more about your class – date widgets, date/time widgets, weather widget
- Latest news – Twitter widget, Dogo Current Events widget. Lots of classes have their own class twitter account and display their tweets using the Twitter widget.
- Links to helpful resources, student blogs and other class blogs – Links widget, Pinterest widget
- Help parents, caregivers and other visitors translate your blog – Google Translate widget.
- Events Calendar for important dates – Google Calendar
- Monthly Calendar – Calendar widget
- Book lists – Shelfari bookshelf and Gooodread bookshelf
- Email notification of new posts – email subscription widget
- Displaying comments or posts recently posted – recent comments widget, recent posts widget
How to Add Widgets
Watch this video to see how to add widgets.
About the Text widget
The handiest widget you’ll find in your dashboard is the text widget.
You can add any other widgets you find on the Internet by pasting their embed code into a text widget in your sidebar.
This is how you add widgets from Voki, Shelfari Bookshelf, Flag Counter, Feedjit Live Traffic Feed, Google Calendar and so more!
We’ve provided links under most widgets on this blog that takes you to the website where you can grab the embed code for that widget.
Adding these widget is as simple as follows:
1. Grab the embed code for the widget you want to add.
2. Go to Appearance > Widget.
3. Drag a text widget into your sidebar.
4. Paste the embed code into the text widget.
5. Click Save and Close.
6. You should now see the widget in your sidebar.
Our widget information on Pinterest
Perth
