Widgets Anywhere

Up until now, the only way to use widgets was by opening them in the BookWidgets app on an iPad. It was possible to put special links to your widget in web pages, but these links still only worked when opened from within an iPad app or browser. Unfortunately, this left some teachers who wanted to use interactive widgets but didn’t have iPads or tablets in their classroom out in the cold. 

We’re excited to announce we’re now removing this limitation: from now on, you can open our interactive widgets in almost any modern browser on Mac, PC, Android tablet, or Chromebook with an internet connection.

In order to use your widgets on the web, you just need to open (or create) your widget, upload/publish it, after which you get a web link that you can open on any device. We’ll go through the steps in detail below for both our desktop and web widget editors.

Sharing widgets from the desktop editor

After creating (or opening) your widget, you need to publish the widget to the web. You can do this by clicking on the ‘Upload’ Button at the bottom.

If your are not logged on yet, you will be asked to login with your account.

Simply fill in your email address or username and password and you’re set. 

After your widget has been uploaded to our cloud servers, you will receive a shortcode as always, a short combination of letters and numbers that uniquely identifies your widget, which your students can enter in our iPad App to open the widget. 

However, you can now also get a web link to your widget, which also works on other devices and browsers. If you click on the ‘share’ icon in the top right of your widget, you’ll get a dropdown menu which allows you to copy a web link to your widget in your clipboard, or put it into an email that you can send to your students:

This will put a link into your clipboard that looks like https://www.bookwidgets.com/play/FF2PS , which will open in any browser.

You’ll notice there is also an item to share your widgets with teachers, but we’ll cover this in another blogpost.

Sharing widgets from the web editor

Sharing links to your widget from the web editor works much in the same way as from the desktop editor. After opening your widget in the editor, publish it by clicking on the ‘Publish’ link in the top right:

After your widget has been published, you will see a shortcode popping up in, a short combination of letters and numbers that uniquely identifies your widget, which your students can enter in our iPad App to open the widget.  However, you can now also get a web link to your widget, which also works on other devices and browsers. 

If you click on your widget’s shortcode in the bottom left, it will open a dialog with the links to your widget:

You can copy the “Share with students” link to your clipboard using Cmd-C (or Ctrl-C on PC), or you can click the email button next to it to send it directly to your students via email. 

You’ll notice there is also an item to share your widgets with teachers, but we’ll cover this in another blogpost share with teachers.

Widgets in action on the web: Raquel School 

David is an English teacher who is always in search of using the best and most innovative techniques for teaching English. He started by creating his own iBooks, but has in the meantime set up his own complete website with lessons and interactive exercises for his students. He uses BookWidgets throughout the site, and therefore relies on these widgets being available on many browsers and devices. If you want to see how David ended up integrating BookWidgets, head over to his website, or have a look at his testimonial where he explains how easy it is to integrate widgets on a webpage.

Conclusion

Being able run widgets on a Mac, PC, Android tablet, or Chromebook allows you to share and use your widgets with even more people than before.

 

Bart Buckinx

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BookWidgets enables teachers to create fun and interactive lessons for tablets, smartphones, and computers.

Choose from over 40 exercise templates (quizzes, crosswords, jigsaw puzzles, ...), and adapt them with your own content.