Product Description

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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #153548 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

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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Customer Reviews

learn drupal using this great "cookbook"
Drupal for Education and E-Learning

Another great book in the drupal revolution! This book is unique in that it is really a "cookbook" for a teacher (of any kind) to setup a new drupal site to use to enhance their classes.

The target audience is new or intermediate drupal users. The examples go through creating a very usable class oriented website, but the skills illustrated in the book would really work for any website design.

I enjoyed reading one of the first tips in the introduction.. "take notes," it sounds like a teacher but it is a great way for a new system admin to document the choices they made setting up their system. It makes it much easier to go back to change something down the road.

There is just about no programming talk in Drupal for Education - so don't be scared - this book will show you how to set up a very useful drupal website as a "site admin." You will be using the administration interface (and copying files) the whole way. The last chapter goes into some of the more technical duties of running adrupal website like backups and "cron" jobs.

The examples in the book - which are all drupal version 6 - go through how to use CCK and Views the main "drupal extensions" that allow an admin to really customize their website. The authors then start adding cool stuff like audio, pictures and video functionality.

Forums, tagging, user accounts and permissions and managing multiple classes on the same website are also well covered. So the secret to this book is that it is a great "learn by example" book for really anyone that wants to setup a pretty complex website. If you go through the examples in this book you will have the skills to create many other "vertical market" type websites.

Thanks for another great book in the Packt series of drupal books.

Good tool for certain Drupal tasks
I bought this group because I was looking for help setting up Organic Groups. I got more than I bargained for. It covers a number of topics in a task-based way, much like the Lullabot 'Using Drupal' book. Thankfully, the two books don't cover the same topics. I was hoping for a much more complex look at Taxonomy strategies for college sites, but that is not what this book is about. It was still worth the money.

Simply Excellent
This book was recommended because of it's section on Organic Groups. I've been working with Drupal for over a year. And over that year I've spent a great deal of time piecing together answers from the web on how to do and setup certain functionality. But in less than 3 hours, I had a site up and running using Organic Groups. I'll add that setting up Organic Groups is not the most intuitive process. This chapter alone saved me countless hours of searching and was worth the price.

Bill's writing is very precise yet easy to follow. There is a nice flow to how the information is presented. He's very good at going through a process, step by step, then concisely explaining why something is set up in that manner.

I should add that though the title indicates a focus on education and elearning, there is valuable info that relates well to many other types of sites.