Drupalcon Boston 2008 - education

Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis

demet — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 18:40:27 +0000

The sites for Arts & Sciences (http://artsci.wustl.edu/), The College (http://college.artsci.wustl.edu/), and University College (http://ucollege.wustl.edu/) at Washingtion University in St. Louis are all part of a single multi-site Drupal implementation for the division of Arts & Sciences.

These sites provide faculty, students and staff with information about academic programs, student services and advising, school policies and procedures, as well as news, events, and a directory of school faculty. Each of the three sites has a consistent look-and-feel that also captures the unique personality of each school and its community.

The sites include profiles of featured students and articles about people and projects that are making the most of what Washington University in St. Louis has to offer.

Virtual Kindergarten / Virtual Pre-K

demet — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:51:19 +0000

The Web sites for Virtual Pre-K (http://www.virtualpre-k.org/) and Virtual Kindergarten (http://www.virtualk.org/) were originally built in 2001 and 2004 as part of an early childhood learning initiative at the Chicago Public Schools. These Web sites work in conjunction with a CD-ROM application and video lessons that are available for parents, teachers, and caregivers for use in the home, classroom and childcare centers.

The Virtual Pre-K and Virtual K Web sites are home to bilingual information that helps parents make the most of their children’s early learning. The program addresses key learning concepts with a focus on early literacy and on math, social studies, and science skills. Each lesson pulls together low-cost activities in the classroom, at home, and in the community to reinforce the home-school connection.

More than 400 public school classrooms and public libraries in the Chicago area use the program, as well as the Dallas Independent School District, a consortium of Southern California counties, the Washoe County (Nevada) School District, and the School District of Philadelphia. The Virtual Kindergarten site was a 2006 Webby Honoree and CODIE award winner.

The two Web sites were recently ported into Drupal for ease of maintenance and future expansion, as well as addition of new features, including a blog.

Adams 12 Five Star Schools District

pcorbett — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 03:41:16 +0000

The Adams 12 Five Star School district is located in Thornton, CO - just outside of Denver. Our recently redesigned district Web site is powered by Drupal 5 and serves 40,000 K-12 students and 5,000 staff members in over 50 schools. The site is integrated into our Active Directory, allowing staff to log in and update their respective sections of the site.

Our site also serves as a proof-of-concept for how Drupal can run on alternative databases (not MySQL or PostgreSQL) - we successfully added Microsoft’s SQL Server 2000 to Drupal 5’s abstraction layer. Some of the modules we were able to adapt to work with SQL Server include: views, ldap integration, CCK, webforms, i18n, nice menus, ldap auth, simplenews, IMCE, TinyMCE and sliced menu.

Other features of our site:

bilingual support (currently translating our pages)
100% CSS based
100% SQL Server 2000 support

Thank you for considering our site and please don’t hesitate to provide your feedback!

The Federal Education Budget Project

TKS — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 03:17:00 +0000

The Federal Education Budget Project details the demographics, finances and test scores of all 14,000+ school districts in the United States. It was built for the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation — a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington DC.

This site was built in-house, with very little in the way of real custom development. It makes heavy use of Views, CCK, and some thoroughly modified .tpl.php files for the District and State pages. Users get top-line data presented graphically, and can compare any district to others (either in-state or nation-wide) using the data points they choose.

I submit it here as an example of how much Drupal can deliver even when the “developer” lacks all but the most basic of coding skills. There are undoubtedly more elegant and efficient ways to tackle some aspects of the site — and we continue to work on those — but it’s become a very robust resource already. And aside from the arguments used in the district-comparison Views, and some truly simply PHP in the templates, it’s all done with Drupal’s “out of the box” functionality.

Open University Professional Development

Derek Ahmedzai — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:07:03 +0000

brass|Teacher Resource Center

jranck88 — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:47:09 +0000

The brass|TEACHER RESOURCE CENTER (TRC), part of the brass|STUDENT PROGRAM, is a place for high school teachers to create a community of their own, centered around helping high school students understand the money side of life.

Features of the TRC include:

brass|MAGAZINE articles
Downloadable classroom activities to use with brass content
Student Program blog
Forums to share ideas, news and support
Ability to create a profile and participate in an online community of educators
Student Program news, contests and photos

Romance Languages & Literatures

jastraat — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:56:39 +0000

One of the important goals for this site was to represent each of the different language programs in the theme. This was accomplished by having rotating photos on the front page and in the right column on sub-pages. All images are tagged (using taxonomy) with the related program. Each page in the site may be affiliated with a program, limiting the side photos to photos tagged with the same program. For example, if an event is tagged as a ‘spanish’ event, only photos tagged as ‘spanish’ will appear along the side of the event. Pages without an affiliation randomly display 3 photos from any of the categories.

The site uses CCK and views heavily and Imagecache and Thickbox for the side photos.

MIT Media Lab admissions site

modulist — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 02:15:26 +0000

As first part of an ongoing process to redesign the web presence for the MIT media Lab, studio:module developed a microsite to attract prospective students and researchers to the Lab. The site includes video, rich media and an in-depth overview to the researchers and personalities at the Lab.

The site was designed to be as forward-looking as the Media Lab’s research into technology. The look and feel of the admissions is a ambitious departure from the boxy feel typical of most web sites, fully integrating exotic shapes with HTML in the site’s themes.

About the MIT Media Lab
At the Media Lab, the future is lived, not imagined. In a world where radical technology advances are taken for granted, we design technology for people to create a better future.

The Lab comprises rigorous research and graduate degree programs, where traditional disciplines get checked at the door. Future-obsessed product designers, nanotechnologists, data-visualization experts, industry researchers, and pioneers of computer interfaces work side by side to tirelessly invent–and reinvent–how humans experience, and can be aided by, technology.

The site was developed by studio:module of Miami, FL
Claudio Luis Vera, creative director
Alisha Haydn Vera, designer
Richard Roth, developer
Felix Arteaga, developer

The team at MIT included
Ellen Hoffman
Henry Holtzman
Jon Ferguson
Jeannie Finks
and Steve Pomeroy, Drupal developer

Dewey Tico

cwells — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:14:46 +0000

I have an assistantship at grad school, and for the work I’ve been creating an educational site in Drupal for my professor. He teaches 3D modeling and animation, and also wanted a personal site.

We used the Andreas01 theme (I had to make some adjustments).

We extensively utilize Organic Groups to separate classes out, along with OG Vocab - so that each OG can classify its assignments however they like. We’re also using Image, as well as CCK Imagefield with ImageCache. OG Resetter comes in super-handy, too.

The shared hosting provider doesn’t support ffmpeg, so in lieu of video.module, we created our own CCK node type and are theming “animations” to embed the video.

Young Writers Project

ggevalt — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 05:23:22 +0000

This site represents 18 months of on-the-fly learning and development by a director of a non-profit. Premium has been functionality and reacting to what the teen writers wanted. Have had considerable help from Drupal community along the way.

The site is designed to help us engage students to write, help them improve and help us publish their best work. What has happened in very short order is that these young writers have developed their own safe, respectful community. The energy is amazing. They’ve organized their own Winter Writing Conference, staged user presidential primaries and debates and, of course, established an energy and tone in which hundreds of kids comment on each other’s work each day.

We have about 2,100 registered student users (we screen users to ensure safety) who have, since September 2007 submitted 2,500 pieces to our Newspaper Series (five daily newspaper partners publish best work each week); an additional 4,000 blog posts — poetry mostly; 17,000 comments.

Other features: Other partners — radio stations, TV station, performing arts groups — also present student work; trained top college students serve as mentors and have provided feedback to about 1,100 young writers; students are reading and then reacting to RSS news feeds to the site in our newsblog and, most recently, audio stories which, of course, we call podcasts.

Keep in mind we only serve Vermont and part of New Hampshire, which is a tiny area — a pool of about 60,000 students, but we are getting about 15,000 student visits a month. We have participation from about 225+ schools.

Our basic design is simple — and does need work; it is a modification of a Roople Theme. Student users have provided and continue to provide us considerable feedback through several online surveys and the forums; they are particularly expressive in terms of functionality and features.

So the site servers our mission well — Kids are writing; they’re having fun and they’re learning. Cool.