Adding widgets to Google Docs
Niels Vanspauwen —
Textbooks are a corner stone of educational systems around the world. In most regions, educational publishers provide the bulk of the curriculum. However, many teachers feel the need - and enjoy - supplementing the material they get from publishers with other material: slides, videos, handouts, worksheets and so on.
At BookWidgets, we believe that teacher-created, interactive ebooks are a great way to bring that supplemental material to your student’s devices. If you’re a passionate teacher, odds are that you’ve been creating slides, handouts and worksheets using tools like Word or Powerpoint for years. With more and more classrooms going digital, you need to up your game: plain paper handouts won’t engage today’s students anymore. You need to go digital and interactive as well.
Hard? Not at all. For iPad-only classrooms, we recommend using iBooks Author, but for others, Google Docs offers a nice alternative. They’re not as visually rich and interactive as iBooks, but you can include BookWidgets widgets in Google Docs.
Adding widgets to Google Docs
I’m going to demonstrate the process using a simple document created in Google Docs. To add a widget to such a document, you’ll first need to make it available on the BookWidgets cloud servers. If you’re using the BookWidgets desktop tool for Mac or Windows, you do that by clicking the “Upload” button and copying the sharing link:
In case you’re using the BookWidgets web editor, there’s no need to upload, just hit the “Get shareable link” button and copy the sharing link from the dialog that pops up:
Armed with the sharing link, we can now insert it into our document like so:
A link can obviously be placed on text, but you can also make an image clickable by selecting it and using the same “Insert link” menu item as shown above.
Publishing your Google Doc to the web
Making your document available on the web couldn’t be easier:
Copy the sharing link and pass it around to your students via email, LMS, or any other student communication system.
Try out the sample document we created here:
Open the sample document
