Drupal4Educators is a playground for Becky Kinney and her company, Moonlight Multimedia, to explore the potential of the Drupal Content Management System for use by teachers and faculty members.
Moonlight Multimedia has specialized in the development of highly interactive educational websites since 2003, working primarily with Adobe Flash (originally, Macromedia Flash). Flash has served the company extremely well, and remains an excellent tool for the development of high quality educational content while many other players have come and gone. Recently, however, developments in javascript and the open source community have presented us with another technology that seems worth investing in. The open source content management system recently adopted by the White House: Drupal.
Developing a highly specialized, highly complex skill set is a risky business. The rate of change in development tools is dizzying, and it is far too easy to choose a tool that will fail spectacularly, leaving you with a lot of useless knowledge. One of the most important thing a small firm like Moonlight Multimedia must do is choose its tools wisely. We believe that Drupal is a wise choice.
Drupal provides an extremely secure way to collect and store data generated by a student's online activity, as well as an easy way for teachers, professors and mentors to facilitate the three types of interaction that together comprise the educational experience: student-student interactions, student-faculty interactions, and student-content interactions.
Standard Features
Content types that are supported by default in Drupal include:
- Page
- Story
- Blog
- Forum Topic
- Comment
- Book Page
All these content types can be modified, but with the exception of the Book Page, they are available in their original form here at Drupal4Ed.
Special Features
Installed Modules
- FAQ-Ask : a great addition to the FAQ module, which makes it super-easy to collect and respond to user submitted questions.
- Organic Groups : Used to separate students into working groups, so that their access to materials and editing permissions can be group-based.
- Lightbox2 : It took me a while to find this one, because at first I thought it was all about image galleries. In reality, it is great for anything you want to put into a pop-up window. I'm going to be using this Module a lot as time goes by.
- Mollom : I'm actually just getting ready to install Mollom. It is a module that sends potential user posts to the Mollom website to be checked for spam content. With drupal-sniffer robots roaming the web, I think this is going to be an essential.
- DHTML Menu : Another essential. Creates dynamic menus. I'm not 100% happy with the way it deals with the first page in each submenu, but it's easy and reliable.
- Token : This one is only important on the administrative side, but it's very slick. Lets me create dynamically generated file paths, and email messages just by putting certain words into square brackets. Sweet.
- Markdown: A slick way to add simple html markup without all the extra keystrokes. For example, this bullet list item cost me just and asterisk and a space. Puts the power of wiki syntax right into drupal.
Book Page enhancements
The default Drupal book is a great starting point for those who want to sequence learning experiences for their students. The Drupal4Ed book enhancements are designed to allow easy inclusion of interactive content within a book, as well as in the Page Extras side-panel. This includes a searchable glossary, self-tests, quizzes, and other activities.
To learn more about the Content Types that are available for you to create, click Create Content. If you can not see a Create Content link at the top of the page, send a request for an account. Please include a note describing your interest in Drupal4Ed.com.
If you already have an account, and still do not see a Create Content link, be sure that you are logged on.