Moodle Wave: Embedding Google Wave into Moodle

I’ve previously given instructions for Embedding Google Wave into Blackboard, for you Moodlers out there the process is practically identical:

  1. In your Wave Preview account add [email protected]
  2. Create a new wave with Embeddy as a participant
  3. Embeddy will generate two pieces of code for you to copy to notepad (see screenshot-1)

Wave with Embeddy
Screenshot-1: Output from Embeddy (Click to enlarge)

  1. Once you’ve copied the code you can delete the content and remove Embeddy from the wave
  2. Next you can seed your wave with text, gadgets etc
  3. Now open your course in Moodle
  4. Depend on what version you are running you want to do something like  ‘Add a resource’ –> ‘Compose a web page’
  5. Enter your required resource name and summary. In the ‘Compose a web page’ text entry switch to ‘HTML Source’ view by pressing the ‘<>’ button and paste the code generated by Embeddy (see screenshot-2)

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Screenshot-2: Content editing view in Moodle (Click to enlarge)

Once you have saved this switch to student view and you can see that a Google Wave is embedded into the course (see screenshot-3). Remember the same wave can be embedded and interacted with wherever you like.

A frequently asked question is what does a user see if they haven’t logged into Wave or have a Wave account? Screenshot-4 shows what the student will see in this scenario.

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Screenshot-3: Wave embedded into Moodle (Click to enlarge)
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Screenshot-4: Message if user hasn’t logged into Wave (Click to enlarge)

 

While Wave accounts are still at a premium I’m sure this will change next year. Combine this with the possibility of institutions being able to host their own Wave servers I think this technology will make it easy to add additional functionality to your VLE with very little overhead.

Even without Wave access our colleagues at JISC CETIS have already extracted some of the well known Wave gadgets and embedded them into a Moodle course (See  Using "Moodle Wave" – Live demo). This solution uses the Wookie engine to render the gadgets so no Wave account is needed. If you are interested in findind out more about this I would recommend reading Scott Wilson’s – "Moodle Wave: Reinventing the VLE using Widget technologies".

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