Drupal in public education ...

We do in-house on an OSX server. We have two sites running. We're on our 3rd year of drupal. No committee's- I just did it. Moved from a Dreamweaver/Contribute environment (pain in the ass....).

I started out with a vanilla installation, but then picked up on Bill's DrupalEd & Aggregator-based site distro's. I used that to form the basis of our installation. Combined with a Moodle install and that is what we use.

Our site: http://sp.glenview34.org

Reggie Ryan

1) Do you support it (server-wise) in house or do you host outside/off campus?

Onsite. We host everything internally for 40k+ kids and 5k employees. Our district site is our major drupal install: http://www.adams12.org

2) Do you host on VPS/dedicated or shared? Linux or Windows?

Windows. Shared. IIS6. SQL Server 2000.

3) Do you run multi-site configurations?

Yes. http://hunters.adams12.org http://mcelwain.adams12.org cherry.adams12.org and about 10 others out of 52 schools.

4) How long have you been running Drupal sites?

6 months.

5) How did you originally implement the Drupal process/plan? Did you form smaller committees to discuss and plan implementation?

Small group of us educated others and compared with proprietary vendors. Free & customizable won.

6) What type of environment did you move from (Dreamweaver based, ColdFusion, home grown CMS, etc?)?

Classic ASP / Access DB

7) Clean URLs

We use clean urls, although they may be causing some latency issues. We use ISAPI Rewrite for this.

I stumbled on Drupal v5 recently, and decided for numerous reasons that it would nicely replace my TikiWiki installation. My primary use of TikiWiki was in a collaborative writing exercise with grade 10 drama students writing a script. It grew later to encompass my courses in computer programming, data processing and multimedia.

Not that TikiWiki was or is in any way inadequate; I enjoyed it, and learned a lot using it with my students. There were just a few wish list things that I think, with the input of the DrupalEd group, can easily enough be implemented. Perhaps this is not the place to comment thus, but I am particularly intrigued by the potential linkage to Moodle, which itself represents a significant advance in the delivery of distance education. Its formality and structure is well suited to the delivery of both open-ended and highly structured courses: a first rate learning management system. The Drupal CMS on the other had represents the use of academic tools by students to achieve their goals. I'm not fully versed yet, though. Nor, frankly, am I particularly technical minded. That being said, I'll take a stab at these questions.

1) Do you support it (server-wise) in house or do you host outside/off campus?

I run our CMS off the Ednet server, a Nova Scotia department of education box, somewhere in Halifax.

2) Do you host on VPS/dedicated or shared? Linux or Windows?
Not sure.

3) Do you run multi-site configurations?
Not yet, but will likely soon.

4) How long have you been running Drupal sites?
A few days. Other CMS used previously was/is TikiWiki

5) How did you originally implement the Drupal process/plan? Did you form smaller committees to discuss and plan implementation?

I'm basically doing course planning in Drama 10, guiding students through some reading materials on the play we are studying. Soon, I'll implement a writing assignment: a collaboratively written play of twenty minutes duration. Ultimately, perhaps a podcast of the finished product.
With my computer programming class, I've assigned a study of PHP, and will let the students as their project design and run the student side of things: the social network. Usual stuff like news,weather and sports; events, calendars, etc. I'll let them decide. Suffice to say with no practical HTML coding experience or previous programming skills, their work may not necessarily produce incredible results, but we can hope and encourage it!

6) What type of environment did you move from (Dreamweaver based, ColdFusion, home grown CMS, etc?)?
See comments above.

The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

1) Hosted off campus.
2) VPS (cPanel/Linux).
3) Currently two, but only sharing users, codebase and themes.
4) 1 year with Drupal (so far).
5) The school formed a small committee, developed broad criteria, then employed me to implement the details.
6) I moved from homegrown CMS on LAMP stack.

The DrupalEd site we're running covers prospectus, enrollments, weekly newsletter and class blogs. It is a K-6 (primary) school with around 300 students and currently expanding into high school (7-10). We are currently testing a revamped DrupalEd/CiviCRM site that will handle excursions, sports events, a reference library, canteen, and uniform orders.

We wont be implementing online learning features in the foreseeable future but we are keen to attempt just about anything else.

I work for a Service Center in central Kansas. I've been a drupaler for several years, design our company's web site as a contractor, and then was hired full time to provide sites for schools, districts, and other agencies. Here's my answers:

1) Mostly in-house hosting, but if a client also wants email for their site handled by us, we usually set them up with an account with a hosting company like Siteground.

2) We have a few servers -- Mac boxes, and some virtual servers. I'm not the tech guy in the office, so I don't quite know the right jargon, but we're moving away from a single mac-based web server to a collection of virtual servers on a few physical boxes in our server room.

3) I'm running several cluster of multisite installations, clustered around versions of drupal and module needs.

4) I set up my first drupal site in 2004 for the Kansas Democratic Party. I've run sites since, but now that I'm doing so as a big part of what I do for my day job, I'm doing a lot more of it.

5) It's pretty much all me, most of the time I'm working with drupal. Sometimes I try working with an outside graphic designer, but only when the customer can afford to have custom design. I'm planning to find/hire/train a few more drupal developers in the coming year or two.

6) At the time I started working with Drupal I was working in a small startup shop that was working primarily in Cold Fusion for our custom work, and using CMS packages on a linux server for some of our smaller client sites.

A few sample sites:

essdack.org -- our main site -- showing it's age a lot these days. I'm planning a pretty dramatic redesign in the coming months.

careerpipeline.org -- brochure/information site for local Career & tech Ed program

usd350.com - fairly typical small school district site. These districts can't afford a lot of flashy design, and are slow to take advantage of the power of Drupal, but with upcoming training sessions I'm hopeful that we'll be able to get them to do more with their sites.

We don't give all students access to the blog features, only a single representative from each class has access. To make the users blog look more like a "Classroom Blog", I modified the node.tpl.php to display the Group name instead of the User name when the node is a blog entry. It's almost like cheating, it's such a quick hack.

The weekly newsletter is possible thanks to Views, Panels module (specifically, the new Panel Node), Node as Block, and the Node Clone module (next weeks newsletter). Assembling a newsletter for online viewing or printing is very easy, but we haven't worked out a good solution for emailing the newsletter yet. Our work around is to "view source", grab the HTML, paste it into a Mass Contact email, and send it to users with the "newsletter subscriber" role.

Sadly, we haven't come up with very elegant solutions for either classroom blogs or newsletters yet, but our work arounds are OK for this year. Next year opens up a can of worms, hopefully we'll have more experience by then. I see a lot of potential in using CCK, Views, Contemplate, CiviCRM, Organic Groups, and other utility modules to build a better solution, now we've seen the limitations in our current approach.

I am the tech director for Bainbridge and we have been running our Drupal site since about October 2007. Site can be found at http://www.bainbridge.wednet.edu At the current time our site is the main web presence for all district level information.

1) Do you support it (server-wise) in house or do you host outside/off campus? Completely in house.

2) Do you host on VPS/dedicated or shared? Linux or Windows? Dedicated box running Netware 6.5

3) Do you run multi-site configurations? Yes. Shared core, separate users for each site. We are just in the process of working to get our main school sites switched over to Drupal

4) How long have you been running Drupal sites? In our district for about 8 months but I have managed a couple of non profit Drupal sites for a couple of years.

5) How did you originally implement the Drupal process/plan? Did you form smaller committees to discuss and plan implementation? We paid someone to come up with the design and tried to run on Joomla but it didn't provide the flexibility that I was looking for. I completely rebuilt the theme to fit in drupal and used a joomla to drupal module to port most of the content and have been tweaking ever since.

6) What type of environment did you move from (Dreamweaver based, ColdFusion, home grown CMS, etc?)? Our previous environment was based on html code with the standard look for each page being provided by SSI on an Apache server.

Thanks for that, Erik.

I'm going to play with that Calendar iCal module and see what I can get going. What I'd really like is a way to pull my Moodle class calendars into my drupal site, but maybe I'm just dreaming here.

Hi there, nice group and good conversation : )
I'm using drupal 5x for our k-12 district site www.susd12.org.
1) Do you support it (server-wise) in house or do you host outside/off campus? Site is hosted in-house.

2) Do you host on VPS/dedicated or shared? Linux or Windows? We use a Windows 2003 box and I installed Apache 2x/MySQL/PHP on it instead of IIS. IIS was a bear when I first tried installing drupal so I switched over and basically googled the instructions on setting up Apache as your web-server.

3) Do you run multi-site configurations? Not at this time but I am interested in setting up something like this for our schools. Currently, I've trained non-techie school endusers on posting content to their respective areas of the site.

4) How long have you been running Drupal sites? The district site went live this school year, July 2008 but we have had a drupal based intranet for the past 3 years and have another site for classroom teachers to use for blogging which has been up about 2 years, although it hasn't been publicized just yet. Will need to train on it as well.

5) How did you originally implement the Drupal process/plan? Did you form smaller committees to discuss and plan implementation? Basically, it was me with feedback on organization and design as it progressed from my boss. I've been using drupal for a number of small sites I'm running and liked it's power very much and felt it could go head-to-head with the big companies like powerschool and epowered school. So I decided to use it in district. I used the feedback from endusers and administrators on what they liked/didn't like on the original site and went from there.

6) What type of environment did you move from (Dreamweaver based, ColdFusion, home grown CMS, etc?)? The previous version was all html based, used Dreamweaver/Frontpage. No coldfusion or cms (did dabble in maxpowerweb in asp for school websites but it was very limiting and has been abandoned).