Was cruising the UserLand site trying to find an answer to why Contributing Editors don’t seem able to edit their own posts once they are published, and I came across this message from Lawrence Lee quoting Michael Breidenstein, the Director of Instructional Technology for the Rock Island School District in Illinois:
“We have found Manila to be the ideal way for teachers to publish web pages. It has caught on in Rock Island and now we have Manila sites for our athletics, organizations, administration, schools, teachers and alumni. The sites vary since almost every site has a different managing editor. We are just starting to see teachers take their sites to the next level by having students as members. I realize our site design isn’t the fanciest, but we have found Manila to be the best way to have teachers take control of the content on their sites. Our Manila workshops continue to be our most popular. All workshops are optional and the Manila classes have been attended by everyone – school board members, support staff, teachers, students, alumni and even the superintendent have learned to publish web content with Manila!”
Key to me is the “every site has a different managing editor” line, exactly what we are working toward here. I sent Michael an e-mail hoping to pick his brain.
We too, at Conners Emerson School <http://www.emerson.u98.k12.me.us> are set up so each teacher is the managing editor of his or her site …. and students have lesser privileges. we’re still mixing in a bit of Apache web server where it works too. Several schools in our district will be moving toward this model as we’ve been pretty successful at providing a fairly dynamic school site with most teachers on board now.