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

About the Author

James G. Robertson hasn't always been a developer. He started his long road to Drupal with a degree in history from Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC. After not being able to find a job that could use a history degree, he went to get his master's degree in journalism and public affairs from American University in Washington, DC. While working on his degree at AU, he worked as a teacher's assistant, taught himself Drupal, and developed his first website for The American Observer, American University's graduate journalism school publication. After internships at J-Lab and the Newseum, he worked for the National Geographic Society producing content and occasionally blogging for sections of nationalgeographic.com. After a year at National Geographic, he made the move to developing websites with Drupal full-time for Bravery Corporation, a public relations and marketing firm in Washington, DC. He now works at REI Systems, an IT services company in Sterling, VA.

Bill Fitzgerald was born in 1968, and worked as a teacher for 16 years. During that time, he taught English and history, and worked as a Technology Director at the K12 level. He began using technology in his own teaching in the early 90s; from there, he moved on to database design and systems administration. During that time, he began developing strategies to support technology integration in 1:1 laptop systems and in desktop computing environments.

In 2003, Bill founded FunnyMonkey, an open source development shop working primarily within education. He is active in various educational and open source communities. He blogs about education and technology at http://funnymonkey.com/blog.

When Bill is not staring deeply into computer screens, he can be found riding his fixed-gear bicycle through Portland, OR, or spending far too much time drinking coffee.