These session proposals are for the Drupal in Education Unconference.
Put session proposals below. Please include a description of what you would like to discuss.
Session Idea: Supporting Teacher Professional Development
What are some of the components of a successful professional development program? How can Drupal be set up to support teachers as they continue to grow professionally, and teacher supervisors as they help teachers develop through their careers?
Session Coordinator: Bill Fitzgerald
ELMS
Everything you ever wanted to know about the hottest Drupal distribution geared towards education and how LMS disruption is just the beginning! I'll be covering what ELMS is, some philosophy of design, where it's going, demonstrate capabilities and how you can get involved. Better yet, giving some simple ideas of how you can take the platform further and tailor it better to your needs (hint, download some modules). Interested parties should come ready to ask lots of questions because ELMS has been my unit's "Moon shot" and I've been able to solve a lot of drupal issues as well as edu specific issues along the way as a result. There have also been a lot of velcro modules contributed back (10 I think) that I'd be happy to go into in detail if any developers would like to talk about things at an API and code level.
Exp Level: "I've heard of Drupal" though this will be tailored based on audience experience level
Presenter: btopro (err... Bryan Ollendyke)
How did you get drupal into your organization?
Round table / informal Q and A focused on the 1 question we hear a lot at Drupal camps/cons/IRCs/forums: How did you get administration accepting of Drupal as a platform for education. This can go into getting open source adopted more generally as well as steps you can take to help foster the community even more.
Coordinator: Bryan Ollendyke
Panelists: Anyone that has been successful in getting Drupal adopted in their organization
Exp level: "I've heard of Drupal"
The modules behind EthosCE: Course, Certificate
We will present some of the open source functionality behind EthosCE, a Drupal distribution geared continuing medical education (CME). We recently contributed a module called Course, which integrates any number of course "objects" into a single e-learning course. We also plan on talking about the history and direction of Course module and the API for exposing more activities or content to Course. Some demos/points of discussion include:
- Creating course outlines with graded/ungraded requirements using Quiz, Webform, and simple objects like Poll
- Managing enrolment/attendance with Signup, using Ubercart for paid courses
- Awarding course credit and PDF certificates using Course Credit and Certificate modules
- Integrating Moodle, SCORM/Common Cartridge, LTI, and the future of integrating course content
Coordinators: Devin Zuczek, Scott Rigby
Exp Level: "I've heard of Drupal, I'm also into education"
Integrating enterprise media solutions
Round table focused on embedding institutional enterprise media in Drupal sites. Educational institutions use a variety of enterprise media solutions including media distribution servers like Wowzaa, Adobe Flash Media Server, Helix Universal Media Server, and Silverlight; as well as lecture capture products like Panopto, Tegrity, and Accordent. In Drupal, there are many ways to embed and display media content. This session will be an informal roundtable where panelists discuss their institutional media solutions and what they use in Drupal to display or interact with that content. I anticipate that Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 solutions may be discussed.
Coordinator: Brandon Neil
Panelists: Anyone that has example from their institution on how they handle media content from enterprise media solutions.
Push-based communications for academic engagement
Round-table discussion of how notifications, recommendations, and activity streams can be used to put useful learning & activity information into the hands that need them. Discussion of recipe pros and cons both limited to Drupal modules and integration with external services.
Coordinator: Adam Ross.
Panelists: Anyone that has learned valuable lessons doing this.
Experience level: Intermediate Developer/Advanced Site-builder.
Caveat Emptor: I work for a company that wants to sell an external service, and is running towards deep Drupal integration.
From Jason Pamental @ Schoolyard: We've developed a 'Feature' for newsletters that combines Simplenews, Simplenews Stats and a few other modules to create a pretty comprehensive newsletter solution that helps keep your content within your site and newsletter creation in the hands of the site owner. We're happy to share code, use cases and pros/cons of this approach as well.
Responsive design and Schools - why it's so important now, and more so in the future
Responsive web design is a huge topic, but still in some ways treated as a bit of a fad. It's been our experience at Schoolyard that mobile access and use of school sites runs as high as 25% or more with the schools we serve. Without addressing this audience adequately you stand to exclude, underserve and potentially alienate a huge portion of your own audience (to speak nothing of potential new families/students). Making your site responsive doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing major project. There are a number of good starting points out there (we have one for D6 based on Zen that we're going to share) and we'd like to use this session to talk about how to get started, what the tripping points can be and help you find the right resources to get started. (Secretly hoping Bill F. will jump in here as well as they've also put together a responsive theme called Terrain)
Coordinator: Jason Pamental
Panelists: Anyone who has experience with responsive design and wants to contribute
Experience level: Beginner to advanced - can depend on audience and panel participation
As with Adam, I do work for a company that builds web sites for schools - but I'm here to contribute our code, not sign up new clients!
Drupal in K-12: We'd like to contribute our core to start a D6 K-12 Distribution
We've gotten a lot out of Drupal and the Drupal community - so much so that we've been able to build a business out of making web sites for independent schools based on it, growing from zero to over 40 schools in about 2 years. We've talked about this in the past but as they say in the Drupal community: talk is cheap, code is gold. So with that we'd like to plop down a pile of coin in the form of our core system (based in D6) as the basis for a K-12 distribution. I'm hoping this session can help rally a core of K-12 school folk to talk it over and get some steam behind this and Bill F's new D7-based distribution 'Julio'.
Coordinator: Jason Pamental
Experience level: Beginner to advanced - can depend on audience participation
As with Adam, I do work for a company that builds web sites for schools - but I'm here to contribute our code, not sign up new clients!
Drupal as curriculum
From Drupal 4.6 to Drupal 7, I've used Drupal in the classroom in a variety of ways: as a community-building tool that I installed and maintained myself, as a student installed and maintained community medium and as a tool that students used to create Web sites for clients. I'd enjoy getting together with others who have or want to teach Drupal skills to high school students.
Coordinator: Melissa Anderson, OpenSourcery
Experience level: Any
Introduction to Julio (Public-facing school website distribution)
This is an introduction to Julio, the D7 school website distribution built by FunnyMonkey. This session will include a general overview of Julio's feature set, as well as information on the development and distribution process we used during the build.
Presenter: penguininja (Candice Gansen) and jgraham (Jeff Graham), both of FunnyMonkey
Experience level: Any (folks with interest in distributions especially welcome)
Creating Hierachical Web Sites with Distributed Permissions, Using Monster Menus
Monster Menus (MM) has been actively developed by Amherst College since 2006. It provides many features which aid in the creation of content that is edited by large numbers of people, using different permissions and areas of the site:
- Monster Menus groups contents (nodes) into containers (what we call pages). Each page has its own entry in a hierachical tree represented by a unique URL.
- Each page can have its own permissions, and its location in the tree affects how those permissions are inherited and applied.
- Pieces of content (nodes) can appear on multiple pages, so that one need not enter the same content in multiple places. Contents and/or portions of the tree can be copied or moved easily.
- Any portion of the menu tree, itself, can be shown in an indented list, for navigation. The administrator is given control over the depth of the menu, as well as its starting point.
- Many page attributes, such as appearance themes, can be applied to any section of the tree, and changed by any user who has the ability to edit the higher-level page.
- The list of available themes and content types can also be restricted, based on the tree structure.
- Permission groups are, themselves, organized in a tree structure. An unlimited number of groups can be defined.
- The ability to edit permission groups can be delegated, using permission groups.
- Groups are normally unrelated to Drupal roles. On our site, we have over 14,000 groups.
- Deleted pages and contents are placed into recoverable recycle bins prior to actual deletion.
- Optionally, each user is given their own home page space, which is automatically created the first time they log in. The list of user homepages is browsable and searchable, and optionally grouped by letter, A-Z.
- Multiple sites, using multiple domain names, can be managed using a single set of permissions. Content can be shared across sites.
- Monster Menus includes an API that makes it highly extendable.
Presenter: Dan Wilga (Gribnif)