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Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition
Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition: You don't need to be a techie to build a community-based website for your school. With this guide to Drupal you'll be able to create an online learning and sharing space for your students and colleagues, quickly and easily. , Second Edition

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Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition

Chapter 1. Introducing Drupal

Welcome to the second edition of Drupal for Education and E-Learning!

In the last several years, we have seen an incredible upswing in the popularity and adoption of Drupal. The size of the Drupal community (as of June, 2013) is approaching 970,000 registered users, and Drupal is used to power everything from personal blogs to online stores to learning platforms to sites for record labels.

This book provides details of how to install Drupal and how to customize Drupal to support teaching and learning. This initial chapter provides a high-level overview of Drupal, along with details of how to get the most from this book.

What is Drupal?


A concise definition of Drupal is difficult to come by, as many people use Drupal for many different things. The following definitions provide an incomplete cross section of how different people use Drupal (our working definition is the final one in the list):

Our definition: Drupal is a tool that helps people build interactive websites. It is free to download, install, customize, and use.

Drupal – a short historical overview


Drupal was started in 2000 by Dries Buytaert when he was a student at the University of Antwerp. Dries, along with some friends at the university, wanted a way to communicate about the various details of their lives. To meet that need, Dries wrote a web-based application that allowed people to share notes. In January 2001, Dries decided to release the source code, and the Drupal project was born.

The Drupal handbook provides a more detailed overview at http://drupal.org/about/history.

Drupal has gone through many improvements over the years, and as of the writing of this book, Drupal 7 is the most recent major version. It is the version we will be using in this book.

What Drupal can do for you


Drupal is not a traditional Learning Management System (LMS). Drupal started as a community-building platform and these community-centered roots form the range of possibilities available within Drupal today.

Drupal provides a wide variety of useful tools for educators. For the instructor, Drupal can serve as a blogging platform, allowing teachers to communicate directly with students, parents, and the larger school and Internet community.

Drupal also offers a flexible range of privacy options that allow users to keep some, or all, of the content within a site private. However, a Drupal site can be used for far more than a secure blogging platform. Within a single Drupal site, you can set up social bookmarking, podcasting, video hosting, formal and informal groups, rich user profiles, and other features commonly associated with social web communities. Building your site in Drupal allows you to start with precisely the features you want and expand as needed. This book provides the information needed to build, maintain, and grow your site.

Drupal terminology


Drupal, like most software applications, has a specific lexicon. Mastering Drupal jargon is useful for many reasons, not the least of which is that using Drupal-specific terminology can help you search for information more effectively. The glossary in this chapter will give you an overview of commonly used Drupal terms and what they mean.

This list of terminology will cover our common tasks and features. For a glossary that delves into some of the technical aspects of Drupal, the Glossary page in the Drupal handbook is a useful resource, which can be found at http://drupal.org/glossary:

  • Entity: An entity is a new concept in Drupal 7 and it describes one instance of an entity type.

  • Entity type: An entity type groups together fields and is used to store and display data. Examples of entity types are nodes, users, comments, and taxonomy terms.

  • Field: A field is a reusable way to enter, store, and display information on the site, such as text, dates, and numbers.

  • Bundle: A bundle is a certain kind of an entity type.

  • Node: A node is a piece of content that has been created on your site. For example, if you create a page, you have created a node. A node is an entity type and each individual node you create is an entity.

  • Content type or node type: On your Drupal site, you will have different types of nodes or content. The default installation comes with the two content types: the Article and Basic page. As we progress through this book, we will create a variety of other node types, such as bookmarks, student blogs, audio nodes, and so on. While all types of nodes are content, different node types can have different functions on your site. A content type is a bundle for the node entity type.

  • Post: A post is a piece of content of any content type. For example, if a user creates a page node, they have created a post.

  • Core: Core refers to the base installation of Drupal. The core installation consists of the essential modules and some basic themes for Drupal. Although any person who has an account on drupal.org can suggest a change to the core codebase, most changes to core are thoroughly reviewed by developers within the community and only a small number of people have the rights to actually make changes to core. As a result, the core codebase is stable and secure. The core codebase can be downloaded from http://drupal.org/project/drupal.

  • Contributed modules: These have been written and shared by members of the Drupal community. Unlike core, which represents the work of several hundred contributors, most contributed modules have been written by individuals or small teams working together. The contributed modules extend the functionality of Drupal, and this book describes how to use various contributed modules effectively. However, you should be cautious when installing a new contributed module. The contributed modules have not been reviewed as thoroughly as core. An overview of all the contributed modules is available at http://drupal.org/project/Modules.

  • Theme: The themes control the look and feel of your site. The core installation comes with several base themes and you can download a range of contributed themes from http://drupal.org/project/themes.

  • Menu: The menus provide a lists of links and can be used to create an organizational and navigational structure for your site. All menus can be seen and edited at admin/structure/menu; additionally, all menus create blocks.

  • Block: A block displays content within a specific place on the page. All menus create blocks but you can also embed HTML within a block. The blocks can be administered at admin/structure/block.

  • Region: Every theme defines specific regions; blocks can be placed into these different regions using the administrative menu at admin/structure/block.

    Note

    Menus, blocks, and regions are covered in Chapter 14, Theming and User Interface Design.

  • Taxonomy: Taxonomies can be used to organize content within a Drupal site. Drupal permits site administrators to create different taxonomy categories to organize posts. For example, when posting an assignment, an instructor might want to create two taxonomies: one for the type of assignment and another for the subject of the assignment.

  • Term: Terms or tags are specific items within a taxonomy. For example: a physics instructor creates two taxonomies to organize assignments. The first is the type of assignment and the second is a subject. If the instructor assigns his or her students to read an explanation of the theory of relativity, this assignment could be tagged with Reading (for the type of assignment) and Relativity (for the subject).

  • User: This is the technical term for people using your site.

  • Role: All site users belong to one or more roles. The site administrators can assign different permissions to different roles.

  • Anonymous user: Any person who visits your site and is not a member of your site is considered an anonymous user. The anonymous user role allows you to specify how people who are not site members can interact with content and members of your site.

    Note

    It is possible to remove all rights from the anonymous users, making the content of your site fully private or a walled garden.

  • Authenticated user: All site members are authenticated users and belong to the default authenticated user role. This default role can be used to assign a base level of rights to all the site members. Then, other roles can be used to assign more advanced privileges to users.

    Note

    Roles and access control are covered in more detail in Chapter 5, Enrolling Students.

  • UID1 (User ID 1): This is the first user on a Drupal site. UID1, by design, has full rights over your entire site. As a matter of best practice and security, UID1 should only be used as a back-up administrator account. Often, problems with your configuration will not be visible when logged in as UID1, because UID1 has more rights than other users.

Taking notes


A final piece of advice before we launch into building your Drupal site: buy a notebook and keep it next to your computer. Use this notebook in the same way a ship's captain uses his/her log by taking brief notes on what you do and why.

In the process of building your site, you will make decisions about module configurations, user roles, design tweaks, and so on. As you are making these decisions, you will be fully convinced that you will remember each decision you made and why.

Unless you are the exception that proves the rule, however, you won't remember. And this is where your notebook comes in. Use the notebook to record the changes you make. A useful entry will include the URL where you made the change and a brief description of why you made the change.

For example, if I am adjusting user privileges for the authenticated user role, I would enter the following in my notes: At admin/people/permissions/2—adjust user privileges so that the authenticated user role needs to have comments approved.

This way, when you are trying to remember why you made a specific change, you will have a record of your decision-making process.

Summary


This chapter provided an overview of Drupal and the functionality that you will be able to include on your site. Now that we have covered the general details, it's time to begin working directly with the software. In the next two chapters, we will install Drupal and start exploring the core functionality that you will use to build your learning community.

So, keep your notebook handy, and let's start building your site!

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Key benefits

  • Create a powerful tool for communication among teachers, students, and the community with minimal programming knowledge
  • Produce blogs, online discussions, groups and a media hosting platform using Drupal
  • Step-by-step instructions in a teacher-friendly approach; creating your classroom website will be an enjoyable task

Description

As social networks become more popular, their role in the classroom has come under scrutiny. Drupal offers a wide variety of useful tools for educators. Within a single Drupal site, you can set up social bookmarking, podcasting, video hosting, formal and informal groups, rich user profiles, and other features commonly associated with social web communities. "Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition" teaches you how to create your own social networking site to advance teaching and learning goals in the classroom, while giving you complete control over features and access. Communicate with students, share learning resources, and track assignments through simple tasks with this hands-on guide.In this book you will learn to install and configure the default Drupal distribution and then extend it to include blogs, bookmarks, a media sharing platform, and discussion forums. The book also covers how to organize your site to easily track student work on the site, and how to control who has access to that information. Additionally, it teaches you how to make the site easy to use, how to maintain the site, and how to ask for and receive help in the Drupal community.

Who is this book for?

If you are an teacher, tutor or an educator who wants to build a website for your classroom, be it elementary or any higher education, "Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition" will guide you in achieving your goal at every step. No experience with programming languages, HTML, or CSS is needed to understand the examples in this book.

What you will learn

  • Build an intuitive structure to allow students and teachers to find relevant content by creating blogs for both teachers and students
  • Create roles and permissions for controlling access to different parts of the site
  • Share and manage bookmarks, podcasts, images, and video to support teaching and learning
  • Foster discussion and communication among teachers, students, and also the larger school community to collaborate on projects
  • Support multiple classes within the same site
  • Publish assignments for students in your courses, and track student responses to those assignments
  • Learn to exchange help with the Drupal community
  • Discover how to backup and maintain your site once it is built
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Table of Contents

16 Chapters
Introducing Drupal Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Installing Drupal Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Getting Started Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating a Teacher Blog Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Enrolling Students Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating the Student Blog Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Bookmarks Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Podcasting and Images Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Video Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Forums and Blogs Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Social Networks and Extending the User Profile Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Supporting Multiple Classes Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Tracking Student Progress Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Theming and User Interface Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Backup, Maintenance, and Upgrades Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Working Effectively in the Drupal Community Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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interesante material
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Chris Chinchilla Sep 01, 2013
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
Drupal for Education and elearning by James G Robertson and Bill FitzgeraldOne of the commonalities with packt's Drupal titles is that whilst covering a variety of themes, they often include a lot of basic material that is included in all titles. This makes the titles great for those looking to cover a particular theme or topic from start to finish, but for those looking for more depth (or reviewing titles) you will spend some time reading through familiar territory such as installing, modules, site maintenance etc. On one hand covering the basics each time enables the writers to put topics in appropriate context for their audience, but on the other, it was could be a nice idea to sell smaller titles stripped down to the basics that only cover completely relevant topics.Anyway, enough of that tanget."Drupal for Education and elearning" is basically a title that describes how to configure several modules to best appeal to a school audience, in this case blogs, groups, submitting assessments and presenting multimedia content, often tied into what you might want to do this and how it potentially ties into a school program. It does this by introducing modules such as views, organic groups, media and concepts such as fields, display modes, entities and relationships.The book also delves into some more complex topics such as PHP snippets and command line interactions that feel a little forced in for good measure, but they do at least hint at the future potential of your website.All in all a great introductory guide for those in education looking to explore Drupal who aren't afraid of delving into the deep end after some brief paddling.
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