Adding a Gadget or Widget to your Blog

Adding a Gadget or Widget

Adding a gadget or widget into your Blog is as simple as going to the Layout page and clicking, add widget!
There is an array of already laid out gadgets or you can customise your own. On the right hand side of this blog you can see a YouTube widget on affordances of technology that I have added. Just think, five minutes ago I didn’t know how to do this. A step by step instruction can be found at http://www.wikihow.com/Add-a-Widget-to-Blogger

This is a post from EduBlogs (teacher challenges) that describes how widgets are used in class blogs:

How widgets are used on class blogs
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. e.g. Flag Counter, Feedjit Live Traffic Feed, ClustrMaps, Revolver Map.
• Student engagement e.g. Quiz widgets, Pet widgets.
• Information to help other classes learn more about your class e.g. date/time widgets, weather widget
• Latest news e.g. Twitter widget. Lots of classes now have their own class twitter account and display their tweets using the Twitter widget. Here is where you’ll find my list of Class Twitter accounts and School Twitter accounts.
• Links to helpful resources, student blogs and other class blogs e.g. Links widget, Pinterest widget
• Help parents, caregivers and other visitors translate your blog e.g. Google Translate widget.
• Events Calendar for important dates e.g. Google Calendar
• Book lists e.g. Shelfari bookshelf and Gooodread bookshelf
• Email notification of new posts e.g. email subscription widget
• Displaying comments or posts recently posted e.g recent comments widget, recent posts widget

 (Waters, 2013)