Building Custom Widgets to Enhance Your Home Pages

Barry DahlSr. Community Manager, Desire2Learn

Widget-based Home Pages

• Before you begin setting up your course home page, consider the needs of your students:– What information is most relevant to them as

students in your course? – What course materials and supplementary

materials will they need?– How can you maximize your course home page

to include relevant information?

Widget-based Home Pages

• At-a-glance, what do you want students to see?– Course news and updates– Important dates and reminders– Links to course content– Links to supplementary materials– Relevant RSS feeds

“Traditional” Home Page w/News & System Widgets

V10 Widget Layout Options• Suggestions:

– Maximize the use of screen space

– Don’t repeat things in widgets and nav bars

– Encourage your students to enter course through home page, as much as possible

8 Layout Choices

Two Equal Widget Columns

Large Column on Left

Three Column Layout

Three Contest Entries

Three Embedded Polls

Replace strings

Community Posts about Widgets

• RSS Feedcommunity.desire2learn.com/rss-feeds-in-a-d2l-widget/

• Semester Countdowncommunity.desire2learn.com/custom-widget-semester-countdown/

• Twitter Feedadding-a-twitter-feed-to-your-course-homepage/

• RotateContent Randomized Contentlaura-gibbs-shares-jit-for-widget-contest/

Laura Gibbs – Oklahoma University

Some Problems with Widgets

• Mixed content blocking in most browsers– Check out the Firefox extension

• Lack of “https:” embed code for widgets• Widget-building sites come and go:

– Google Gadget– WidgetBox

Full Custom Home Pages

• Any webpage/site can be used as a custom home page in D2L.

• Examples:– Course blog– RSS aggregator– Any course-specific web page

Custom Page Example

Let’s look at some examples

• Go to the Ignite LE• Barry’s RUF Sessions