Adding a Japanese Dictionary to Moodle
Recently I’ve worried that we have strayed a bit from our tagline “The Open Source Language Lab” during the transition to PoodLL 2. And yesterday my students complained that the Yahoo Japanese/English dictionary widget from our old PoodLL/Moodle 1.9 site was not there anymore. Aha! Here was a good chance to put some of the LL back into PoodLL. Watch the video and I will show you how to add the Yahoo Japanese/English dictionary to your site.
(If you’d rather read about it, scroll down below the video.)
The first thing I did was create an HTML block, and called it Yahoo Dictionary.
I then went to the yahoo.co.jp website and performed a search using their dictionary. Then from the dictionary page I used the amazing Firefox plugin “Firebug” to to find the html source for the search form and copy it. Then I copied that html into the new block using the html source editor button on the html editor.
And just like that the dictionary was working. I had to make a few extra changes to keep it small enough to look good in a block, and to make the search results appear on a new tab. But I was surprised how simple it was to do. Here is what the result looks like.
Just to save you some time, if you wish to put a Yahoo Japanese/English dictionary on your Moodle page here is the html that you should paste into your HTML block. Please leave a comment below if it works for you.
