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

Summary


In this chapter, we have created a miniature course management framework scalable to thousands of courses. We have…

  • Places for lesson materials, assignments, and calendar events

  • A course front page that automatically displays the latest homework assignments and announcements

  • A syllabus that gathers a course summary from individual lesson descriptions

  • An easy way to keep students up to date with RSS

We've also touched on a few points of pedagogy and information architecture, like the impact of online comments on a class.

Where to go from here

If you are in a hurry to get a course management solution up and running, you might want to skip ahead to…

  • The Styling Your Site chapter if you are satisfied with this functionality but want to improve the markup or CSS a bit

  • The Creating Forms Fast chapter if you would like to add more sophisticated turn-in capabilities

  • The Blogs and Forums chapter if you need those content types

  • The Calendaring chapter to explore more ways of displaying and filtering events