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)

Activity


The activity stream of BuddyPress is the social hub of our site. When we install BuddyPress, a new page of our public site titled Activity is created. The Activity page acts in a similar fashion to the news feed of popular social networks. From the Activity page, registered site users are able to quickly share updates, comments, and links. This is an incredibly frictionless way for both instructors and students to post content to the class site.

One way in which I have seen the effectiveness of the BuddyPress activity stream is to encourage students to use it to post questions. On many occasions other students will respond to the question before the instructor has even had the opportunity to respond.

Using mentions, we can target replies and comments at specific students and encourage students to respond directly to one another. To mention another BuddyPress user, we simply add @username (with username replaced by the actual username) to an activity post.

Whenever a user is mentioned...