drupaled.openacademic.org

Yup yup.

Ability to add moodle in later with single sign on?

Sure.

Want to add MediaWiki with same single sign on?

Ok.

Bill Fitzgerald is the man.

http://www.funnymonkey.com

Drupal Ed is your answer, brah.

I wish that I had experience with either Drupal or Elgg – I am the consummate tinkerer with web applications, although my coding skills are limited to html, php and minimal mysql (and I’m darned lucky that so many open source folks cater to exactly those packages!). I have installed Moodle multiple times, and find it to generally be an extremely straightforward installation; beyond that it’s very modular and has a huge support base.

Since we’re a K-8 school, our cms needs are a little bit different than yours; our cms is called Site@School and it’s used by hundreds of primary schools all around, particulary in Europe (the team that runs it is based in The Netherlands).

But if I can offer any encouragement, it would be to NOT have anyone mess directly with html (unless teachers like you want to tweak something). Heck, I don’t even barely touch the bare html in my own teacher pages, since I get a richtext editor (our teachers still think that somehow I named the editor after myself…). My holy grail of cmses would be a truly WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop editor, unrestrained by html’s image layout, but I don’t know where that cms is yet. In the meantime, about 40% of our teachers actively maintain their teacher page(s). Active means at least once a week, us middle school teachers often edit ours daily with hw assignments (which of course YOU would not need to worry about!).

I’m a little uneasy with somehow justifying getting a bigger server or more drive space, to somehow act as a catalyst for more teacher usage. That sounds sort of like supply-side technology to me; I prefer to grow to the point where our usage of a given item (web space, video projector, Smart board, etc.) is causing enough folks to want/need it, that we then need to purchase more. On the other hand, web server storage space is not horrifically expensive, although I don’t know exactly how your school obtains it (on the open market from web hosting companies? do you run your own server? does the school district provide space?).

One final thought – I waffle back and forth about my desire to keep all of the content within the confines of my own school website, vs. linking from our pages to other free resources like wikis, blogs or YouTube. The control freak part of me (I was a technology coordinator for eight years before transitioning to math, and I’m still the school’s network admin) wants to have 100% of the stuff going on within my own site. That means that I have to get MediaWiki up and running (which I do right now), WordPress (which I do) and some sort of video hosting (which I definitely do NOT do). But gosh, there are so many free, even banner-less, resources to use out there that I sometimes feel like passing off the headaches of running the back ends (databases, security, etc.) off to the folks who really DO know what they’re doing. So the purpose of this paragraph is just to encourage you to consider outsourcing some of your needs, at least as you grow up the faculty to be more 2.0’ers, until someday you find that they’ve got 72 YouTube accounts, 54 blogger.com accounts, and so on, so that then there’s some real justification for hosting it all yourself.

Darned if I’m not rambling way too long; I’m sitting in a library at the college where my brother is presently teaching his Intro to Ethics class, so I have far too much time on my hands. Sorry!!

Let me just say that we’re about to launch Drupal here, and we’re a bit intimidated too. It’s an INSANELY powerful tool, which is awesome, but it’s also an INSANELY powerful tool, which makes it a bit overwhelming.

One of my concerns is that we have suspended using Elgg right now because it wasn’t meeting our needs, but because Drupal seems so overwhlelming, we’re not blogging as much as we should be.

Hi Dan: It sounds like you have quite an undertaking here. I wish I could add something substantial to your quest, but I am still wrapping my brain around a lot of this, learning from those above me (as in literally in this column of comments) who know a lot more about it than I do.

So, in the absence of real expertise on specific 2.0 ed apps, I will instead make some more philosophical type suggestions: keep the decision makers in your school from committing to a single solution for the sake of having a single solution. Eric’s comment above rings true. Get students involved in helping develop a solution. From what I’ve been hearing, the so-called 21st Century skills include adapting to new situations and problems. This is one. Most likely whatever you choose will not be a permanent solution.

Another considering involves student writing. Some of those sites, like Moodle, seem like they are really geared best to support school work and the like. That’s great. But that doesn’t mean that’s the best pedagogical approach for encouraging authentic student writing through blogging. If you want students to use blogs in a natural, organic way there needs to be some kind of distance from making it feel like a homework requirement. That may be an argument for coming up with a solution that is not just one killer app, but many, just as Bud Hunt and others have commented on Eric’s post.

Finally, there has been an interesting, if not meandering, thread about this topic that I’ve taken part in that you may find helpful – http://burell.blogspot.com/2007/03/more-on-abuse-of-student-blogs-for.html

Anyway, good luck with your presentation. I enjoy reading your blog, and I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Bing

Of course, it will take a while to overcome tech-angst no matter how simple the app, and we’ll ultimately never rid the world of nay-sayers (which ain’t necessarily a bad thing).

Anyway, I double-checked your want ad and considered your last comment. I’m also assuming your looking for free or free-ish solutions. So, revised thoughts:

Simplest Single Solution: WordPress MU won’t do all the things you listed in your want ad, but it is probably the easiest.

Most Complete Single Solution: Moodle does most of it, and you can make it prettier, but it’s always left me kinda … meh.

Best Compromise: If I had to pick only two apps, and ease of use from the teacher end were my priorities, I’d go with Elggspaces and Wikispaces. Wikispaces for “course pages” (and perhaps later, student collaborative projects) and Elggspaces for the interactivity, individual blogs, community, podcasting, file sharing, etc. Both are easy and customizable (more so if you’re hosting the elgg software yourself). You won’t get the calendar feature with this solution, but dropping in a communal Google Calendar isn’t that tough.

Best Hope: I’m still thinking OpenAcademic might end up being the solution, but it’s just not ready yet.

Hail Mary: I’ve kicked the tires of Think.com, but never given it a test drive, so it might be completely wrong for what you’re after.

There may be other solutions, but if there are, I haven’t met ’em yet.

Once again, good luck.

I think you find success by finding a good balance between flexibility and ease of use. This is probably a retro solution in this day and age, but for my school we’ve had great success with MovableType. The “courseware” apps are neat, but complex and overwhelming for the vast majority of staff. So I didn’t even look at them. We just need little sandboxes where collaboration can happen.

I will say you are on the right track with whatever you choose; a weblog-type cms is a great way to go because it releases people from organizing files. Plus they benefit from port 80 not being filtered by our district’s firewall. This means people can work on their slice of the website anywhere at anytime. When I chose to implement a weblog cms last summer, I investigated WordPress, WPMU, MT, pMachine, ExpressionEngine, MediaWiki–you name it. In the end, I went with MovableType.

I did this for three reasons:
1) Sandboxes. The idea that each person/group/department/project gets their own place to use that won’t interfere with another.
2) Flexibility. The great thing about a complete set of template tags is that you can roll out new sandboxes that are customized to meet the needs of the audience/users. This means the complexity of the sites teachers interact with can change as they become more confident in their abilities.
3) Static files. Our last solution was based on dynamic publishing. When the database went down or whatever, so did the site. It’s hard to “break” serving static files. Although there are trade-offs to this one.

For the success of our school and getting people to maintain an active web presence, number 2 was key. I’ve been able to scale the website along with the staff’s abilities just by editing template files. Our online homework customized so it is drop-dead-simple for teachers to use. It took about an hour to develop by tweaking templates.

Right now, it’s mostly teachers, administrators and office staff that publish online. Since we’ve acquired a laptop cart, I’m now attempting to get students publishing to the web for a new/different audience than their teacher. If all goes well that will come to fruition next week. (fingers crossed)

Last bit (I promise!). Last summer, WPMU wasn’t baked yet, so I reluctantly crossed it off my list. But in managing a WPMU installation outside of school, I’m glad I did. In my WPMU installation I have to worry about splogs or fake users appearing; not so in MovableType because I’m in charge of blog/user creation. Also in MovableType there are site-wide views of posts and comments so I can see what is happening across all the sandboxes at once. This is important when considering that I have a desire to see everything without visiting each blog for comments. One downside is that I can’t force a site-wide rebuild of the static files (the aforementioned trade-off).

Now I’m sure someone can come along and say well WP/WPMU can do that, too. It probably can, but I have personally found MT to be easier and faster to manage. As a math teacher that moonlights during one period as the “Tech Guy” that is important to me.

Sincerely,
John Simms