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

Getting interactive


Now that students can create blogs in the site, you have the ability to foster dialogue within your class. The easiest way, of course, is simply through commenting. Students have the rights to comment on assignments, and on teacher and student blog posts. However, students might also want to reference other pieces of content in their work. In this section, we will set up a mechanism that will keep track of when one post within the site references another post within the site. This way, people can see when exchanges are occurring about different posts, and it provides another way (in addition to comment threads) for people to hold discussions within the course.

These ideas (including tracking student responses to assignments) are covered in more detail in Chapter 13, Tracking Student Progress.

Seeing who's discussing what

Within the site, we will want to see who is discussing what posts. In web parlance, this is referred to as a backlink. Fortunately, the Views module comes...