Drupal for Education and E-Learning

Опубликовано VladSavitsky

Авторы книги:

Bill Fitzgerald

Информация о книге

Язык: английский
Издательство: Packt Publishing Ltd
Страница книги на сайте издательства
Страниц: 333
Размер: 191mm x 235mm
Дата выпуска: октябрь 2008
ISBN: 1847195024
ISBN 13: 978-1-847195-02-9

Описание

Teaching and learning in the classroom using the Drupal CMS

Use Drupal in the classroom to enhance teaching and engage students with a range of learning activities
Create blogs, online discussions, groups, and a community website using Drupal.
Clear step-by-step instructions throughout the book
No need for code! A teacher-friendly, comprehensive guide

In Detail

Social media in the classroom provide unique opportunities for teaching and learning. This book helps you break through the hype, and shows you how to build a site in Drupal that incorporates the Web in your class, on your terms, to achieve specific learning goals.

This book provides the essential details to get the most out of your Drupal site. In clear, step-by-step instructions, you will learn how to build a site that is easy to use, easy to navigate, and supports the teaching and learning you want to emphasize.

Drupal for Education and E-Learning provides a step-by-step overview of how to work with Drupal to build a feature-rich learning environment. In this book, you will learn how to configure the default Drupal installation, and how to extend your site to include social bookmarking, a podcasting and video sharing platform, image sharing, and interactive discussions around rich media content. You will also learn how to organize your site so that, as learning occurs over time, you and your students will be able to track their work history.

What you will learn from this book

Drupal terminology and how Drupal works
How to build an intuitive structure to allow students and teachers to find relevant content
How to build an instructor blog to communicate with your students and also the larger school community
How to publish assignments for students in your courses, and how to track student responses to those assignments
Using roles, and role-based privileges, to support teaching and learning
Sharing learning resources using tags and bookmarks
How to set up a podcasting platform that allows podcasts to be aggregated in a variety of places, including iTunes, thus enabling students and teachers to share information with anyone at any time
How to set up informal working groups alongside classes to create a safe space for students to collaborate on class projects
How to develop your site using best practices, and maintain it safely and securely
Extending your site by installing contributed modules and themes
Setting up and using some of Drupal's most popular modules: CCK, Views, and Organic Groups
Approach
The book focuses around creating educational activities in Drupal, with lots of examples of realistic courses and classroom ideas – and how to implement them.
Who this book is written for
This book is for anybody looking to use Drupal to support teaching and learning; more generally, the examples given in this book can also be used by anybody looking to use Drupal to publish social media. This book is not a developer's manual; you do NOT need to know code, or HTML, or CSS, to benefit from this book. People new to Drupal will find clear examples describing how to set up their site. More experienced Drupallers will find tips and tricks for extending their site, and step-by-step instructions on how to make the most out of Drupal's flexibility.

Author(s)

Bill Fitzgerald was born in 1968, and worked as a teacher for 16 years. During that time, he taught English and History, and worked as a Technology Director at the K12 level. Bill began using technology in his own teaching in the early 90s; from there, he moved on to database design and systems administration. During that time, Bill began developing strategies to support technology integration in 1:1 laptop systems, and in desktop computing environments.

In 2003, Bill and Marc Poris founded FunnyMonkey, a Drupal development shop working primarily within education. Bill started and manages the Drupal in Education group on http://groups.drupal.org, and is active in various educational and open-source communities. Bill blogs about education and technology at http://funnymonkey.com/blog.

When Bill is not staring deeply into computer screens, he can be found riding his fixed gear bicycle through Portland, OR, or spending far too much time drinking coffee.