Drupal for Education and E-Learning

Drupal for Education and E-Learning by Bill Fitzgerald
Publisher: P-Pu (November 28, 2008) | 400 pages | ISBN: 1847195024 | PDF | 11 MB

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.

About the Author

Bill Fitzgerald

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.

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.

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