Socratic Monologue
I’ve had some great feedback from my podcast Why Schools Need Drupal, as well as the generic high school site I am prototyping using Drupal. Dries Buytaert was even kind enough to encourage me to repost the blog entry from the podcast on the Drupal site and promote it to the front page. One net result of all this was that the podcast was downloaded over 1000 times! Now I’m really starting to feel some pressure to come up with something decent for the next podcast ;^)
I’ve been asked a couple of times to give a bit of a description of the setup of Drupal to create the generic high school site, so here it is. The theme and all modules listed are described in more detail at the Drupal website:
- The theme is SpreadFirefox – nice and clean design, and standards compliant
- Modules enabled:
- book – for collaboratively working on school policy document, or other documents
- comments are turned on, but only for teaching staff so they can comment on policy or other items. Other users cannot see the comments. I thought this would provide a nice backchannel for communication between staff
- events – information about What’s happening this week? is available instantly to everyone. Any teacher can add an event.
- flexinode – used to create school specific information forms. This hasn’t been extensively developed yet, except for an event node.
- organic groups – I thought this might be useful for grouping information together for various groups within the school, such as for staff-only information, student clubs, etc.
- poll – a good way to get feedback from students, and also to generate interest in the site
- upload – allows documents to be attached to entries. Many schools have a large legacy of forms that could be made available online by converting them to pdf format, then attaching to site entries
As the development continues, I’ll put some more notes up here (as well as on the generic high school site as well). One area that I am not currently interested in is turning Drupal into a course management package, for two reasons. First, there are many great open-source packages that already do that (Moodle is a terrific example, and one that I have used quite successfully). Second, I think that course/curriculum delivery is not the most important function of schools; I think the communications and knowledge generated by the people within schools is far more interesting and important to everyone within the school. Hmm – that might make a good topic for a podcast sometime.
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I just wondered if you would be interested in sharing your generic drupal high school site. I would be willing to host the zipped file (maybe with the db.sql file, the drupal files, and brief install instructions) and provide the bandwidth if that were an issue. I think its a great idea and is a nice template for people to start with, instead of starting with a scratch drupal install. Looks like a great idea!
As a side note: A killer open-source information strategy: Wordpress for blogs Drupal for community sites Moodle for course-management
It looks like (based on what you are using or said you are using) that you would agree. Thanks for a great post and I’m going to listen to the Podcast to see what other ideas you have about using Drupal with schools.
Hi Brett. I haven’t put much time into the generic high school site lately, but I think it might be time to start getting into it again. I like the idea of putting together a zip file of my current installation for others to use/build on, but I’d also (selfishly, I admit) like to develop my current template site a bit more. Let me know if you are interested in helping to fix up the site a bit before I zip everything up for public distribution. Thanks for the offer on bandwidth – once the template is out, you are certainly welcome to put it online for distribution.
I very much agree with you on the wordpress-drupal-moodle trinity as open source tools for developing information sites. Each tool certainly has its strengths and weaknesses, but in combination they can be very potent.
Rob,
I’m willing to offer any help I can give to get the template site developed how you’d like it. What additional things did you have in mind? My current project is to implement drupal-powered sites for all 35 schools in our district. Currently they are hand-coded and extremely static, which means they are not really that useful (or used), though they look nice. I’m looking to pilot the project at 4-5 campuses before rolling it out on a wider scale.
Let me know how I can get involved, I think the idea could be very useful to schools, and provide a reason for parents and students to come to the school website. Making it an more valuable information source than it currently is (at least in our district).
My goals are pretty much the same as yours, Brett, although I’m trying to get teachers to come to the school website as well; this may be a larger challenge than the students and parents. ;^)
I’ve noticed that Drupal 4.7 will be released soon, and D’Arcy Norman has been looking at the beta. I’m going to ask him if its worth waiting for before I revive the project. I’ll send you some details by e-mail then we can start doing some building.