Book Image

WordPress for Education

By : Adam Scott
Book Image

WordPress for Education

By: Adam Scott

Overview of this book

WordPress is typically known as a platform for blogging. However, the versatility and simplicity of WordPress makes it the perfect solution for the needs of professional educators. WordPress for Education guides readers through the practical applications of WordPress in a classroom setting. Readers will gain an understanding of the WordPress platform and how it can be used to create powerful classroom websites. WordPress for Education guides educators through the process of setting up a typical class website, creating student blogs, and using WordPress to power a learning management system. WordPress for Education provides clear and practical examples for using WordPress within the classroom. It will empower educators to create useful and engaging e-learning websites. Through the examples given in the book, you will gain an understanding of how to use WordPress to build an engaging and easy to update e-learning website. You will also learn about a variety of WordPress plugins that extend its abilities and usefulness in an educational environment, such as creating student blogs, keeping track of classroom events, managing coursework, and developing a classroom social network.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Widgets


Widgets are small pieces of functionality or content that can be added to specific areas of our site. WordPress offers a variety of widgets including category lists, links, recent comments, text areas, tag clouds, and a search box. These widgets can be added to any widget-ready area of our site.

The most common widget area is a sidebar, though many themes support a variety of other widget ready areas, including the header and footer. The widget areas will vary based on what is supported by the active theme.

To access the Widget screen, hover over the Appearance tab and choose the Widgets field. The Available Widgets page appears in the main area of the screen. The available widget areas are seen in the right sidebar. To add a widget, click-and-drag the available widget to the desired widget area.

In our sample course site, I've chosen to add several widgets:

  • Text to add an additional text area to the page sidebar. This can be useful to detail class information such as the meeting...