Book Image

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

As social networks become more popular, their role in the classroom has come under scrutiny. Drupal offers a wide variety of useful tools for educators. Within a single Drupal site, you can set up social bookmarking, podcasting, video hosting, formal and informal groups, rich user profiles, and other features commonly associated with social web communities. "Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition" teaches you how to create your own social networking site to advance teaching and learning goals in the classroom, while giving you complete control over features and access. Communicate with students, share learning resources, and track assignments through simple tasks with this hands-on guide.In this book you will learn to install and configure the default Drupal distribution and then extend it to include blogs, bookmarks, a media sharing platform, and discussion forums. The book also covers how to organize your site to easily track student work on the site, and how to control who has access to that information. Additionally, it teaches you how to make the site easy to use, how to maintain the site, and how to ask for and receive help in the Drupal community.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Drupal – a short historical overview


Drupal was started in 2000 by Dries Buytaert when he was a student at the University of Antwerp. Dries, along with some friends at the university, wanted a way to communicate about the various details of their lives. To meet that need, Dries wrote a web-based application that allowed people to share notes. In January 2001, Dries decided to release the source code, and the Drupal project was born.

The Drupal handbook provides a more detailed overview at http://drupal.org/about/history.

Drupal has gone through many improvements over the years, and as of the writing of this book, Drupal 7 is the most recent major version. It is the version we will be using in this book.