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

Additional options for social networking and user profiles


In many social networking sites, people often want to allow users to become friends with one another. Although the advisability of this type of interaction in a classroom setting is a matter of much debate, this functionality can be delivered through the User Relationships module, available at http://drupal.org/project/user_relationships.

There are several modules that provide streams of what users are doing on the site or import activity from other social networks. Some of these modules include Activity Stream (http://drupal.org/project/activitystream), Follow (http://drupal.org/project/follow), and Heartbeat (http://drupal.org/project/heartbeat).

Additionally, if you want to work directly with the theming layer, the possibilities for user profiles are virtually limitless. For more information on using the theming layer, refer to Chapter 14, Theming and User Interface Design. Additionally, you can find excellent information in the...