Drupal for Education and E-Learning, 2nd Edition

Create web-based, content-rich tools for teaching and learning

Overview

• Create a powerful tool for communication among teachers, students, and the community with minimal programming knowledge
• Produce blogs, online discussions, groups and a media hosting platform using Drupal
• Step-by-step instructions in a teacher-friendly approach; creating your classroom website will be an enjoyable task

In Detail

As social networks become more popular, their role in the classroom has come under scrutiny. Drupal offers a wide variety of useful tools for educators. Within a single Drupal site, you can set up social bookmarking, podcasting, video hosting, formal and informal groups, rich user profiles, and other features commonly associated with social web communities.

” Drupal for Education and E-Learning – Second Edition” teaches you how to create your own social networking site to advance teaching and learning goals in the classroom, while giving you complete control over features and access. Communicate with students, share learning resources, and track assignments through simple tasks with this hands-on guide.

In this book you will learn to install and configure the default Drupal distribution and then extend it to include blogs, bookmarks, a media sharing platform, and discussion forums.

The book also covers how to organize your site to easily track student work on the site, and how to control who has access to that information. Additionally, it teaches you how to make the site easy to use, how to maintain the site, and how to ask for and receive help in the Drupal community.

What you will learn from this book

• Build an intuitive structure to allow students and teachers to find relevant content by creating blogs for both teachers and students
• Create roles and permissions for controlling access to different parts of the site
• Share and manage bookmarks, podcasts, images, and video to support teaching and learning
• Foster discussion and communication among teachers, students, and also the larger school community to collaborate on projects
• Support multiple classes within the same site
• Publish assignments for students in your courses, and track student responses to those assignments
• Learn to exchange help with the Drupal community
• Discover how to backup and maintain your site once it is built

Approach

With clear instructions and plenty of screenshots, this book provides all the support and guidance you will need as you begin to create your classroom website. Step-by-step tutorials show you how to use Drupal in the most efficient and effective ways possible. People new to Drupal will find a good introduction of the basics; while more experienced users will learn useful tips and tricks for using Drupal in a classroom context.

Who this book is written for

If you are an teacher, tutor or an educator who wants to build a website for your classroom, be it elementary or any higher education, “Drupal 7 for Education and E-Learning – Second Edition” will guide you in achieving your goal at every step. No experience with programming languages, HTML, or CSS is needed to understand the examples in this book.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introducing Drupal
Chapter 2: Installing Drupal
Chapter 3: Getting Started
Chapter 4: Creating a Teacher Blog
Chapter 5: Enrolling Students
Chapter 6: Creating the Student Blog
Chapter 7: Bookmarks
Chapter 8: Podcasting and Images
Chapter 9: Video
Chapter 10: Forums and Blogs
Chapter 11: Social Networks and Extending the User Profile
Chapter 12: Supporting Multiple Classes
Chapter 13: Tracking Student Progress
Chapter 14: Theming and User Interface Design
Chapter 15: Backup, Maintenance, and Upgrades
Chapter 16: Working Effectively in the Drupal Community