Pedagogle - a file resource sharing site

So about 2 weeks ago, just before a break from school, I gave a presentation titled Using of Open Source Software in Education which is a topic that discussed quite a bit, but not often at my school. During the presentation I made the observation that if education were more like Open Source, we would solve a lot of problems involving resources that teachers have. In the context I was discussing during the lesson, I viewed a resource as a lesson plan, a worksheet, a test, an image, an audio clip to share with students, etc...

The problems teachers face with resources is that they:
1. Have trouble organizing their resources and therefore finding resources they want to use again.
2. Have trouble finding resources from other teachers.
3. New teachers have to spend so much time planning their lessons and dealing with classroom management, they have no time to find resources.
4. When veteran teachers retire, often nearly their entire collection of resources disappears along with them.

Now that many teachers are creating their digitally, they need better tools for keeping track of their resources. They also want to be able to easily share these resources with other teachers, and have the ability to find specific resources by topic. A quick search of Google's search index will quickly show how difficult it is to find anything decent for pretty much any educational topic.

A number of sites have sprung up over the last couple of years to try and handle this problem, but very few of them make it both easy to upload content and find content. I tried out some of these sites and I found the navigation unintuitive, cumbersome, and the process for getting involved looked too difficult. Another major problem is that once you find the lesson plan, worksheet, etc... it is almost always in HTML format, which makes it difficult to print it out immediately. I hate copying and pasting from HTML to my document editing program because of all of the fixes I usually have to make to the formatting of the document.

So over my week off from school I've built a site to share digital resources online. The layout is simple, finding content is easy, and getting involved is as straight forward as creating an account, and clicking an 'Upload Resource' link.

What was interesting for me, as a developer, when creating this site, is that it was my first experience in really digging deep into Drupal 6 and seeing the power of the modules which have been ported over from Drupal 5. Always before I've been sticking with Drupal 5 because of my concern over being able to implement all of the features I feel are necessary for my site. Since I created this site 2 weeks ago, I've actually nearly completed 2 more Drupal 6 sites, which shows the power of Drupal.

I coded one custom module for this site. My wife wanted to be able to add help text to any page pretty quickly to help our users get started. The problem is, I didn't see any easy of doing that so she could make the changes easily as a non-coder. So I created a module which allows you to search for a path, create help text for that path (or override existing help text) and then add the help text to the top of that page. Search for the path again, and you can edit the help text. If anyone knows of an existing module which does this already, let me know because I didn't find it when I searched Drupal.org.

I also made some major revisions to the Taxonomy Manager module, which allowed me to break the permissions for administering taxonomy into things like "add taxonomy term", "edit taxonomy term", "delete taxonomy terms", "move taxonomy terms".

Anonymous users can only view the taxonomy terms in a collapsible tree, and click on the term name to view all nodes under that term.

As soon as you log in, you gain the ability to add topics to the tree. Once you log in and upload enough resources to become a moderator of the site, you gain more permissions.

If you manage to stick it through and get to the admin level role, you can do almost anything you want to the tree (except delete multiple terms at a time...notice the radios instead of checkboxes).

The search form for finding resources is pretty much a stock view, with some custom theming of a couple of the fields, particularly the filemime field. I had to do some research and figure out which mimetypes recorded by Drupal corresponded to which most widely used application or file type.

I'm also using the Userpoints module to give users points for the actions they take on the site. The more things they upload, the more content they produce, the more positive points (called Karma on this site) they get. When you get enough points, you get an automatic upgrade to your user role, which gives you additional permissions on the site. This helps the site manage itself, because active users get more of a say in how the site operates, which is exactly what they want.

There are still some issues with the site that need to be resolved, but all in all it is working pretty smoothly. One major thing that needs to happen is that the site needs some branding, which means a distinct clean theme, and some logos to go along with the theme. Another is that since the site is free to use, and will probably consume a lot of server space and bandwidth, I need to find some funding for server space. Hosting it on my $90 a year shared webserver isn't going to work for long.

You can view the site, suggest improvements, help out if you want, join if like. Just go to http://www.pedagogle.com.