Re: [OT] Experience with getting participation in school web site by teachers
I think Bill is right (especially with his experience with the product). Moodle is probably the best choice given the academic context - wordpress and plone are great general CMSs, but Moodle has all of the educational custom features that you would have to make on your own. My understanding is that its the open-source version of BlackBoard Also, O'Reilly has a book about Moodle. Eveytime I hit the computer/programming section of Barnes and Noble in Newington/Portsmouth, there's been a copy on the shelf for at least a year - not a hot book, unless you have that very niche neednot sure if you can sample the book online, so its probably still there if you want to peruse it. Good luck -Martin Ledoux Dan - any relation to Hannah JenkinsI recall her mentioning an Uncle Dan, or something like thatafter all, Dan and Jenkins are really uncommon names! ;-) On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Bill Sconce sco...@in-spec-inc.com wrote: Moodle... It does many of those things. (Of course, it also does real education stuff, course content management, class forums, etc. :) -Bill ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ -- Martin ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: [OT] Experience with getting participation in school web site by teachers
Moodle... It does many of those things. (Of course, it also does real education stuff, course content management, class forums, etc. :) -Bill ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: [OT] Experience with getting participation in school web site by teachers
See also: http://www.open1to1.org/index.php/Main_Page https://eduforge.org/ http://www.os4ed.com/index.php I have a strong interest in applying free technology in the education arena. It's not just a technology problem but a multi-faceted issue. I believe one of the many challenges is to ensure that whatever solution is put in place, that it actually meets the needs of the constituents in a way that supports their knowledge and work habits. Put simply, this means that systems need to work with email and office application formats. Or, that the solution is so well designed that usability is very high. ~ Greg On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Bill Sconce sco...@in-spec-inc.com wrote: Moodle... It does many of those things. (Of course, it also does real education stuff, course content management, class forums, etc. :) -Bill ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ -- Greg Rundlett Web Developer - Initiative in Innovative Computing http://iic.harvard.edu camb 617-384-5872 nbpt 978-225-8302 m. 978-764-4424 -skype/aim/irc/twitter freephile http://profiles.aim.com/freephile ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: [OT] Experience with getting participation in school web site by teachers
Dan Jenkins wrote: I am looking for tools to make it easy for them to update content (broadly defining content) and provide an overarching structure to make it easy-to-find. Definitely some sort of content management system is the way to go for them. Allows a designer to set up a basic 'looks good' set of pages and then they can spend the time filling in content vs. trying to make each individual page look good. There's lots out there to chose from (I see WordPress has already been mentioned). Recommend you look at the security history of whatever you decide to pick. Our CMS of choice right now is Plone. Although it tends to be a bit difficult to get set up and configured, it is fairly easy for end users to work with. We've deployed close to a dozen Plone sites so far and they've been well received. A few Plone features that may be of interest to you: - good security - heavy focus on web standards - meets Section 508 compliance for accessibility (important for a school accepting federal funds) - supports microsite concept: e.g., each school would have it's own site, with a different theme, with security permissions based within that site (or, at a high school, you might set up a microsite for each department and even various clubs). - through-the-web image editor for easily resizing images. - nice WYSIWYG editor - automatic navigation builder (i.e., create new page and it shows up in navigation). - built-in full-text search. - ability to do full text search in uploaded files (.doc, .pdf, etc.) - plus, all the usual features you think of in a CMS. Like I said, there's lots of options out there. Plone happens to be where we've landed after using a number of other options. Hope this helps. --Ray ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
[OT] Experience with getting participation in school web site by teachers
This is totally off-topic (except that we use Linux for all of the server infrastructure there), but I figured some of you may have some insight on this issue. We have an elementary school as a client. They want to have a more dynamic web site with teachers / classrooms having more up-to-date web presence. Web presence defined as any of web page(s), blogs, wiki, etc. Each classroom sub-site could be different. They just want to have something which teachers would update with minimal effort for those who won't/can't expend more effort. As most places, there are a few zealous ones, a bulk of if-it's-not-too-much-trouble (or, to be honest, I-don't-have-enough-time-as-it-is) ones and a few no-way-no-how ones. They do not have a clear idea of what they want to present, nor to whom. (I know that ought to be the first thing, but they simply don't know yet.) This is brain-storming phase. They tried a website some years ago, with each classroom having a web page, but it bogged down. They were using various web editors (Publisher mostly), and most people got tied up in the effort of creating web pages that looked good to them, versus content that was useful to others. I am not looking for ways to inspire them (though I will be happy to listen to any). I am looking for tools to make it easy for them to update content (broadly defining content) and provide an overarching structure to make it easy-to-find. They have four Linux servers (Mandriva), with the usual LAMP. We are planning on overhaul of their Linux servers this summer to address performance (on their email server/web filter) and storage issues (they are doing much more video editing and space has gotten tight). This summer would be a good time to put any new infrastructure for this in place. Does anyone have any suggestions? -- Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, - 603-206-9951 *** IT support excellence for thirty years ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: [OT] Experience with getting participation in school web site by teachers
I setup WordPress for a personal blog and for two non-profit organizations that I'm involved with. It's designed to work with the LAMP stack. In fact, in one case, we ended up switching web hosts (IIS/Windows/ColdFusion server to Linux/Apache/PHP) just to make it easier to get WordPress setup. In any case, I think WordPress would be an excellent fit for your requirements. The pages are all editable using a rich text editor in a modern web browser (like recent versions of Firefox). For your case, I think the effort would be minimal enough for each teacher to edit their static pages and blog posts. Uploading pictures with thumbnails is very easy. You can also upload a bunch of themes to your server and then each teacher could pick a theme and even fairly easily switch themes while preserving the underlying content. One of the neat things is that a change history is kept for the pages/posts so you can easily see what changed. --Peter If your curious, here's the sites that I've had a hand in creating or maintaining over the last 6 months or so: http://www.dobratz.us/blog - baby pictures. This was my first foray into WordPress and it was created with a 2-week-old at home and under the duress of receiving many emails from relatives near and far complaining about not having enough baby pictures. The wordpress instructions claimed that it takes 15 minutes to install. It took me 30 minutes (file permissions needed modifying, PHP file upload limit needed and increase). http://www.litchfieldchurch.org/ - this is a new URL for my church and new website. It replaced the old website which was handcrafted using static HTML pages with updates every 3 months or so. http://www.nashabitat.org/ - replaced an existing handcrafted site with ColdFusion. Updates ot the site were spotty, and sometimes would take 6 months. One tricky thing here was a web form, but we found a WordPress plugin to handle this: http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Dan Jenkins d...@rastech.com wrote: This is totally off-topic (except that we use Linux for all of the server infrastructure there), but I figured some of you may have some insight on this issue. We have an elementary school as a client. They want to have a more dynamic web site with teachers / classrooms having more up-to-date web presence. Web presence defined as any of web page(s), blogs, wiki, etc. Each classroom sub-site could be different. They just want to have something which teachers would update with minimal effort for those who won't/can't expend more effort. As most places, there are a few zealous ones, a bulk of if-it's-not-too-much-trouble (or, to be honest, I-don't-have-enough-time-as-it-is) ones and a few no-way-no-how ones. They do not have a clear idea of what they want to present, nor to whom. (I know that ought to be the first thing, but they simply don't know yet.) This is brain-storming phase. They tried a website some years ago, with each classroom having a web page, but it bogged down. They were using various web editors (Publisher mostly), and most people got tied up in the effort of creating web pages that looked good to them, versus content that was useful to others. I am not looking for ways to inspire them (though I will be happy to listen to any). I am looking for tools to make it easy for them to update content (broadly defining content) and provide an overarching structure to make it easy-to-find. They have four Linux servers (Mandriva), with the usual LAMP. We are planning on overhaul of their Linux servers this summer to address performance (on their email server/web filter) and storage issues (they are doing much more video editing and space has gotten tight). This summer would be a good time to put any new infrastructure for this in place. Does anyone have any suggestions? -- Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, - 603-206-9951 *** IT support excellence for thirty years ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
