Elgg

Please check this shows Google Notebook for links and additional materials: TTT32. Erick Hoefler and Richard Stohlman joined us to give us updates on their work with blogging and discussion forums in the high schools where they work.

Richard’s work with WordPress and WordPress MU is progressing, and he is looking for other high schools who would like to the students on his student’s blogs, especially Charlie’s Advisory’s New York Experience - 2006/2007.

Eric seems to be in the middle of adding to his technology repertoire. In addition to the committed, rich writing that he is having his students do on forums on a Joomla site, he is moving toward the use of an an elggspaces account in his creative writing classes.

Listen in as we discuss how blogs and discussion forums are folding into other cirricula. Some of the questions have to do with how to get other teachers in our buildings to buy in to these new technologies… and in particular, how to think about the process, less finished nature of blog posts when teachers are feel the need for finished products and projects. We talked about how much time blogging takes to develop. Many other issues came up as well, including how to bridge the gap between MySpace problems (although a student joined us to say that we exaggerate these) and the formal writing instruction found in many of our classrooms. Oh… and research. We plan to talk more about that soon.

Please add your voice!

Teachers Teaching Teachers #29
November 15, 2006
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Paul Allison calls in from the airport in Atlanta on the way to Nashville for the annual meeting of The National Writing Project and Susan Ettenheim, Teb Locke, Madeline Brownstone and Lee Baber host a conversation about this week's challenges with students and online communication and collaboration. Sharon Peters shares her first adventures as her students join in the online conversation. Teb shares a very exciting discovery about introducing the mapping projects into the wiki. Here is an example of wiki with an embedded media player: http://theneighborhoodschool.org/wiki/index.php?title=Madison%2C_CT

We had an excellent conversation with Bill Fitzgerald, from FunnyMonkey.com, OpenAcademic.org and the brand spankin new DrupalEd Distribution on how Drupal fits into education. The goal of the show was to create a cookbook for a conference site with Drupal -- we got to it in the last 10 minutes! Thanks to Bill for his time and the excellent conversation.

If you're interested in getting involved in the Drupal Education movement, join the Drupal Documentation Listserv,comment on the DrupalEd Distribution page, and join DrupalEd Drupal.

Past Shows on Drupal, Elgg, and Open Source:

# 11 - Open Source Show
# 17 - The Read/Write Web Conference

Other Drupal Resources:

About Drupal
Drupal Wikipedia Entry
CMS Academy Drupal
Drupal Page at the School Computing Wiki

A discussion with Richard Kassissieh about community portals and open source software. Richard discussed how to build, encourage use, and grow school community web sites.