About

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The Widget Store was developed by IMC AG in scope of the ROLE (Responsive Open Learning Environment) Project. It is a web platform, which represents a catalog of learning widgets and widget bundles to be searched and added in users’ personal learning environments. All the widgets are organized in seven categories:

  • Plan & Organize: Tools in this category facilitate the planning and organization of your learning activities, process and resources as well as the setting of your learning goals (for example Google Calendar, Media List Widget)
  • Search & get Recommendation: These tools facilitate the searching process for learning resources and/ or give recommendation for suitable tools, widgets or bundles (for example Media Search Widget)
  • Collaborate & Communicate: These tools provide the possibility to collaborate and communicate with other participants of your learning process (for example XMP Multi-user Chat, Twitter Gadget, Ether pad etc.).
  • Explore & View: These tools provide access to domain specific learning content. Content may be static (e.g. PDF-Reader, Wikipedia Gadget) or interactive (e.g. an applet to demonstrate mathematic formulas).
  • Train & Test: These tools provide support for knowledge acquisition as well as training and testing of skills (for example Vocabulary Trainer or Record-Yourself – Tool).
  • Create & Manipulate: Tools in this category facilitate the creation and manipulation of content in your learning environment (for example Google Docs, Ether pad and Mind mapping tools).
  • Reflect & Evaluate: These tools facilitate reflection on learning processes, progress, results and environments. (Prototypes and widgets for this category are being tested and will be soon launched in the widget store).

To simplify the search, widgets are tagged with key words indicating category, sub-topic, content sharing platform and the like. They also can be commented and rated by the users to allow better comparison and evaluation.  To support collaborative learning processes, interesting pages found can be shared with other users on Facebook and Twitter.