This is a review of plugins/widgits offered by Edublog to enhance students’ blogs. I picked three plugins to review for this post. I chose “Compfight Safe Images”, “3D Rotating Tag Cloud”, and “Imbed Any Document”.

 

Compfight Safe Images:

This widget advertises that it will automatically add images to your post with proper Creative Commons attributions. The plugin also automatically adds the source from where it found the image. If your assignment makes use of a number of images, using this widget will save you time, since it does the sourcing for you, AND you’ll look like a pro.

Just about all the time, you’ll find what you’re looking for. However, there tend to be other results that you weren’t looking for. I entered “bakery” in the search bar, and it did, in fact, give me pictures of bakeries, chefs, and baked goods, but within those results were also pictures from the closing ceremony of the “Winter Simulation Conference 2017”. The album was had many tags attached to it. One of the tags, oddly enough, was bakery. It seems like the widget looks for pictures that have tags that pertain to the words in it’s search bar. So regardless of what’s in the picture, as long as it has a tag that’s close to whatever you put in it’s search bar, it’ll appear as a result.

3D Rotating Tag Cloud:

A 3D Rotating Tag Cloud. Pretty self-explanatory. The widget takes all the tags it can find on your blog, sizes them depending on how frequently they appear on your blog, and adds them to a cloud. It’s rotated via clicking and dragging.

However, when I installed it on my edublog, the cloud did not appear as a cloud. Instead, it appeared as a wall of hyperlinked text. Perhaps it’s broken or outdated? I checked the documentation for the plugin, and it appears to be out of date. Following it’s instructions, I was supposed to be greeted to a list of customisation options. Instead, I was greeted by three. I could not understand why this is the case.

Viewing the plugin on another peer’s blog, I realise that the tag cloud requires your device to be running Adobe Flash 9. Flash is a very outdated program, and not many devices have it nowadays. Modern devices will not have flash installed, you have to install it yourself. However, there are many cons to flash that outweigh the pros, and I recommend that you do not install Flash simply for this tag cloud.

While there is no 3D rotating tag cloud, there is still a box that contains all the tags on your blog, with the tags being larger or smaller depending on how frequently they appear. You are still free to use it, and it does show what your blog is all about (For me, my blog is made up of mainly math posts).

 

Embed Any Document:

I saved the best for last. This is a widget I personally use after a student brought Mr. Gee’s attention to it, who then informed a number of other teachers about this time-saving plugin. If you didn’t use this widget, uploading and embedding a document into a post for you blog was a pain. You’d have to first

1. Go to your Google Drive or OneDrive, upload the document there.
2. Find the embed code for this document.
3. Copy and paste the embed code into your blog post.
4. Hope to god that it worked.

The issue was that the UI for OneDrive is cumbersome, and slows you down when you’re attempting to look for the embed code. Combine the number of steps with the sometimes spotty internet speeds (If you were trying to embed a presentation, good luck. They’re way too big due to a number of pictures, sometimes videos embedded into the presentation), and it all led to a ball of frustration.

This widget elimintated all of that. You simply click on the widget, click “Upload Any Document”, drag your doc to the window, hit upload, then hit “Insert”. Done! Your document is properly embedded into your blog post. If you’re using a single document in multiple blog posts, you don’t even need to upload it again! You click on the widget, select the document that you already uploaded, and click insert.

A gripe I have with this widget, however, is how complicated it is to set the widget up so it can take documents that are already uploaded to services such as Google Drive or Dropbox. The whole process for connecting the widget to your Google Drive is incredibly complicated, and there aren’t many benefits to the whole thing. If you want to do it, go ahead.