In a continued effort to integrate blogs into the classroom, Terra Williams, Dustin Anderson and myself are using Drupal to teach our first year writing classes this summer. So far, things seem to be going well. Terra, Dustin and I all agree that Drupal is much easier than Blackboard for us to use as teachers and we feel like students are finding it easier to use as well.
If you'd like to visit the classes, they are public on the Internet:
Terra's class
Dustin's classes (two sections using one site)
My class
In fact, we encourage people to take a look because we believe that Drupal, or other open source CMS's, are excellent alternatives to Blackboard and WebCT. In order to promote this view, the three of us, and others (I've mentioned this before here and on Drupal), will be working on providing a Drupal configuration for education.
Note that with Drupal, each student has a blog page on site rather than using individual blogs on different sites. Consequently, the most recent blogs for all students and the teacher are collated via one link (see "blogs" in the header navigation), making it easier for everyone to see what is being posted than when using individual blog sites.
Also realize that there are many Drupal modules not turned on which would allow classes to be configured in a number of different communication configurations. For instance, none of us are using the Drupal forums which you can visit here on Kairosnews (see the link in the header of this page).
Coolness
Looks like your students are really catching on. Does DRUPAL put the popular blogs on the top?
re:coolness
The great thing about administering a drupal site is that you get to decide what is promoted. You have a number of options, but I chose to decide what to promote instead of leaving the front page filled with the lastest entries--you can ran it as a discuss forum, though, listing the latest entries top-down or from the bottom-up. Charlie, Terra, and I all have tweeked our sites to fit our classes. Poke around in the sites listed above to see some of the different types of configs that drupal has to offer.
-dustin
re:Coolness
Yes they are. And they like it.
No about popular blogs. On the blogs page, just the most recent. And everything on the home page is promoted by me. However, I could use the moderation system to let students vote for what goes on the front page, but I felt like this might add too much complexity.
Charlie
cyberdash
Really cool
I'm impressed by all the excellent comments from your students... online collaboration in writing classes is obviously working great. You've put a smile on this Drupal developer's face ;).
re: Really cool
It's been working great. Last semester's classes using 4.2 worked even better (Terra's class and my class). Kudos to Drupal developers. Can't think of a better app for this :)
Too bad we couldn't get some serious investment in development from a universtity or other educational institution (I'm not enough of a programmer). With just a few extra modules I can think of, Drupal could be a good replacement for proprietary elearning platforms institution wide.