Book Image

WordPress for Education

By : Adam Scott
Book Image

WordPress for Education

By: Adam Scott

Overview of this book

WordPress is typically known as a platform for blogging. However, the versatility and simplicity of WordPress makes it the perfect solution for the needs of professional educators. WordPress for Education guides readers through the practical applications of WordPress in a classroom setting. Readers will gain an understanding of the WordPress platform and how it can be used to create powerful classroom websites. WordPress for Education guides educators through the process of setting up a typical class website, creating student blogs, and using WordPress to power a learning management system. WordPress for Education provides clear and practical examples for using WordPress within the classroom. It will empower educators to create useful and engaging e-learning websites. Through the examples given in the book, you will gain an understanding of how to use WordPress to build an engaging and easy to update e-learning website. You will also learn about a variety of WordPress plugins that extend its abilities and usefulness in an educational environment, such as creating student blogs, keeping track of classroom events, managing coursework, and developing a classroom social network.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Finding and installing plugins


Much like themes, plugins can be found and installed from within the WordPress administration interface. Hover over the Plugins tab in the left sidebar and choose the Add New tab. We are then presented with the Install Plugins page.

From the Install Plugins page, we are able to Search for plugins or Upload our own as well as browse the Featured, Popular, Newest, and Recently Updated plugins. Browsing the Featured and Popular categories is a great way to get a feel for the kinds of functionality made possible by plugins.

Once we find a plugin that interests us, we may click the Details link to learn more about it. To install the plugin, click on the Install Now link. In the following example, I have chosen to install the WordPress Jetpack plugin. This plugin adds a variety of additional functionality such as spellcheck, site statistics, e-mail subscriptions, and more.

WordPress will then download and unzip the plugin file to our server. Once it is complete...