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Setting up the Blogging School

August 26, 2006 By Will Richardson

Tim Lauer posts today about Moving to Drupal to create a more complex and flexible blogging/learning management environment for teachers at his school. I have to admit that Drupal

is not something I know very much about other than it seems to be very customizable depending on your work flow requirements. (There are times I wish my brain had a better understanding of code and programming, and there are times I’m glad I don’t.) Tim writes:

I am really excited about using Drupal as a basis for web based student and teacher interaction. Drupal has a host of features that will allow us to have students and teachers use Drupal to manage the workflow of assignments and student response to assignments. For example each of our 4th and 5th grade teachers will have a blog which she will use to post assignments and announcements to students. Each 4th and 5th grade student will have a Drupal based blog that will live behind our firewall.

The student blogs in Drupal will be designed so that the left sidebar will host an aggregator that will pull in the last two assignments from each of the teachers and post them on the sidebar. (see graphic) When this feature is enabled in Drupal each of the aggregated posts also has a little button next to it which show up when a student is logged in. When the student clicks the button, the teacher assignment blog post is captured and quoted in a new student blog post. The student can then continue to write his or her post in response to the assignment.

Sounds like a pretty nice work environment for the students.

technorati tags:drupal, Tim_Lauer, blogging, education

Filed Under: Blogging

Comments

  1. Chris Craft says

    August 26, 2006 at 8:12 pm

    You have inspired me to set up my own learning community/student blog site using Drupal. I have played with the majority of CMS/LMS solutions out there and have found Drupal to be the best for this niche market. It offers a nice balance between flexibility and controlability. Thanks to you and Tim both for the inspiration. I recently posted and podcasted about Drupal and what I am doing. You can find that here…

    http://www.opensourceclassroom.com

    Thanks!

    Chris Craft

  2. dave cormier says

    August 26, 2006 at 11:07 pm

    Everytime we do an analysis we end up back talking about drupal again. It’s the cleanliness of the product that i like. we’ve been looking for a reason to get our first class started here… http://cmsacademy.net/drupal/ along the lines of the webcastacademy. Interested?

  3. alex says

    August 27, 2006 at 3:17 pm

    Sounds like an awesome idea. That was the concept behind http://www.mynoteit.com but most colleges have some sort of teacher-student program (although most are pretty crummy). Now mynoteIT is a free storage area for students to keep notes, papers, grades, and everything else for school

  4. Christopher Harris says

    August 28, 2006 at 10:38 am

    Drupal is indeed great. Not all of our summer work is ready for primetime exposure (we still have a week until kickoff) but the 1.0 versions of quite a bit of our work are ready for display.

    We are using drupal as a bland CMS portal, our digital video streaming website, school library portal with book reviews, and an electronic resources portal. This is one dynamic product – the resources portal, for example, is a dynamicly generated set of resources that corresponds to what our participating districts purchased from our e-commerce system also running in drupal.

    As I said, these are still in our preproduction releases, but the source code for all of the modules involved will be coming out soon. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in more inforamtion or would like to see the code.

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