Book Image

Plone 3 for Education

Book Image

Plone 3 for Education

Overview of this book

Plone enables your faculty and staff to manage their own web sites, but some assembly is still required. How do you represent courses online? What about assignment schedules, lecture podcasts, and collaborative spaces? That's where this book comes in-it takes the burden of routine updates off your web team by harnessing the world's most advanced free content management system. This is the school web team's missing manual. Through step-by-step examples covering 11 common educational use cases, you'll learn how to take the box of parts provided by Plone, combine them with best-of-breed third-party plug-ins, and turn out a dynamic web environment that will be a joy to use for faculty, enhance staff productivity, and engage the student body. Plone is powerful but complex. Its ease of use for end users belies a wealth of under-the-hood features and third-party add-ons that are time-consuming for back-end web teams to sort through. The book guides you on proven paths through the forest of potential that you encounter during design and deployment, starting you with reasonable choices for each of 11 common education-domain use cases. Each one enumerates the value it brings to your site and guides you step-by-step through an implementation suitable for the vast majority of cases, meaning you can spend your time addressing the unique needs of your institutionñnot reinventing the wheel.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Plone 3 for Education
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Tasty recipes


PloneFormGen is an insanely flexible product. Here are a few ideas to get you started customizing it.

Testing

Simple online testing is a breeze with PloneFormGen:

  1. 1. Make a new form, and in the Form Prologue, explain to students that they can submit as many times as they like before the due time, but only the last submission will be counted.

  2. 2. Using the Dates tab on the form folder, set publishing and expiration dates for the test to constrain students to a prescribed test time if you like.

  3. 3. Add questions to the test by adding fields to the form. For example, a selection field displayed as a set of radio buttons makes a great multiple-choice question, and a rating-scale field is a natural choice for groups of true/false questions.

  4. 4. Add a string field called "Login Name". Make it Hidden and, on its Override tab, enter a Default Expression of here/memberId. This captures the student's login name so you know whose submissions are whose. While still on the Override tab, also check...