Thursday, May 21, 2009 9:01 AM
As we gear up for Google I/O, our annual developer conference, we'll be presenting a series of posts highlighting some of the gadgets and applications that have been built by developers using our APIs. Today, we'll start with a few gadgets that might be useful for educators, students, and maybe word-lovers, too.Spreadsheet gadgets allow you to display spreadsheet data in new and interesting ways. Using our spreadsheet gadgets API and the spreadsheet Data APIs, outside developers and other Google teams have been able to add new features into spreadsheets and publish these gadgets to iGoogle, blogs and other platforms. Some older, but popular examples include a Gantt Chart by Viewpath and the Analytics for Google Docs spreadsheets by Panorama.
For this first post in the Spotlight on Developer series, I wanted to show off a few new gadgets that teachers and students might find useful -- for studying for a Spanish exam or learning new vocabulary by playing fun word games.
1. Flash Cards (by Seth Glickman, previous Web Development Intern) - Easily create flashcard sets. HTML is allowed. Ideal for foreign language vocabulary sets, AP Chemistry common ions... anything you'd use flashcards for. Remove cards from view once you know them well enough, shuffle the remaining cards, change languages and more. Try this out.
2. Word Study (by Pamela Fox, Engineer) - Create interactive word games. You can guess using word jumbles, type-ins, or multiple choice, and you can choose to have the hints come from Google Image Search, Google Translate, Wikipedia, or your own spreadsheet. Try this out.
3. Word Search (by Pamela Fox, Engineer) - Create an interactive word search from a column of words in a spreadsheet, with a user-specified number of rows or columns. Try this out.
There are two ways to get started using these gadgets. First, you can use the templates above since they already have the gadget inserted within the spreadsheet. Or you can add these gadgets to your own spreadsheet by creating a new spreadsheet and using Insert > Gadgets. There you can check out all of the gadgets available.
10 comments:
Great, I'll be definitely using these when I resume teaching in the fall.
Flash cards look great. I'll definitely take advantage of them.
I used a Google Doc spreadsheet to make myself a template for printing a domino game that uses frequent words, syllables or even letters instead of dots. I use a find/replace to create sets for my beginning readers.Developers, if you can make it so that after the replace, I don't have to search through earlier versions to get back to the numbers that would be great! http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rwchMZo5EVV0Qa4w6FFYhqw&hl=en
The images used in the Word Jumble of Pamela Fox' Word Study Gadget are not filtered by strict filtering using Google's Image SafeSearch.
This can lead to awkward situations in the classroom (if the school's internet filter allows these images to show at all) or to abuse of the gadget...
Vrey nice - petty you can't change the language of the UI.
Could we get the gadgets URL so we can translate & share them?
Sorry I didn't see the 'get xml url'
So I've made french versions :
French QUIZ
French FlashCards
I know this isn't the proper place for this comment, but the "Your Story" feedback form is broken, and I can't see another place where I can alert this blog's managers to the issue.
Yeah, I agree with Stephen,that form should be fixed, I have a good story to tell!!!
I was unable to get the flashcards to work - either just trying the temmplate or tryinfg to make my own flashcards. Am I doing something wrong?
Anyone having issues with Internet Explorer and this gadget?
Looks great, will be using these gadgets in time. I would like to see an option for the multiple choice exam that immediately tells the quiz taker if they got the correct or wrong answer immediately when answering a question.
Great job guys!
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