Building a school website one blog at a time
Posted by: Rob Wall in WordPress, small pieces, technology in educationI’ve just posted at my work blog about a project to create a new school announcements system that will be powered by WordPress. I wanted to put some notes up here about how it works, and hopefully get some feedback. I also have some ideas about how this could grow - again, feedback would be great. (This does not mean that I’ve recanted my earlier posts/podcasts about how schools could make great use of Drupal - I just like to have lots of tools available.)
Here’s what we do for our announcements now:
- Announcements are given to a secretary who types them up, photocopies them for all staff and a few extra student copies.
- The announcements are read to all classes in period 1 of the school day.
- The word processor file is e-mailed from the secretary to the library technician.
- The library technician copies the announcements and pastes them into a post in Blogger. Other announcements also get posted in the Blogger account.
- The Blogger account publishes the school announcement blog to our own server.
- Using some feed2JS mojo (thanks, Alan), the atom feed from our blogger-powered announcements blog end up on the front page of our school web site
Here’s the great irony in this whole, elaborate fandando - every teacher in every classroom of our school has a computer terminal on his or her desk. It is entirely possible, from a technical standpoint, for each staff member to enter their own events/announcements onto some sort of content management system (including, I will admit, a Blogger powered blog). The teacher librarian at the school has struggled valiantly trying to get teachers to add their own announcements, with only some recent success. It is also possible,right now, for every staff member to go online to read the announcements to their class. Instead, however, we waste vast quantities of paper for ROTA (read-once-throw-away) announcements.
But, the system has failed us this past week. For reasons that I cannot, and do not, care to understand, Blogger can no longer publish the announcements site to our web server. Here’s what I’m using to replace/revamp this system:
- A WordPress powered blog for the announcements and events. The blog will reside entirely on our own server, so outside services failing can’t cripple our site.
- Use feed2js to place the blog content on the school main page.
- Start showing staff and students how to use an aggregator like bloglines to stay in touch with what’s going on at the school!
To do this, I’ve set up a WordPress install with some basic themes and plugins, including:
- K2 theme for wordpress - it just rocks!
- Adhesive plugin - to keep events at the top of the events list so they don’t fall off the main page
- EventsCalendar3 plugin - might be used to create a page of upcoming events for a week/month
If this catches on, and I think it just might, then other staff and students may also want to set up their own blog. Its easy enough to set up a default wordpress install directory with all the desired plugins and themes. The 5 minute install is great, but it would be even nicer to have a script to create a new blog based on a default wordpress directory. I’m not going to explore WPMU - I’ve had problems getting it set up on the school server.
Once we get a bunch of classes and groups with active blogs, we can start to put some of their content on the school front page. This could be done with feed2js, but there are a few plugins (BDP RSS Aggregator and FeedWordPress are two that I’m aware of) that might be able to redirect the RSS content into a single wordpress blog.
Anyone up for some discussion about this?
Further thought: I had a great big well duh! moment last night as I was heading off to bed. I could probably use MyGlu to mix a bunch of feeds together on the front page! Sad to say, though, that my perl hacking skills have atrophied from lack of use, and I’m a little more proficient in PHP. Maybe I’ll try to find a way to integrate MyGlu into a PHP page.
UPDATE - I’ll post some more details later, but I just wanted to let anyone who is interested know that the school page for North Battleford Comprehensive High School now has a listing of events and announcements that is put there by Alan’s uber-cool feed2js thingy which processes the RSS feed generated by the school events and announcements blog. Its not much, but its a start and a proof of concept to show others. There are some discussions that need to happen before the front page can be revised, but I think this is a nice model for how to shift the school website, including the way information gets added and updated, at a gradual pace.
I’d also like to thank all the commenters for some terrific suggestions and ideas. These are very much in my mind as I’m planning the next step.
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January 17th, 2006 at 09:48
Daily Update — January 17, 2006…
Here’s our take on news that matters for Tuesday, January 17. Today’s theme is doubletake and here are a some links to headlines about technology that is changing the way we live and learn.
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January 17th, 2006 at 13:19
It would be pretty simple to do in PHP - for me, the only thing I haven’t figured out yet is using the Magpie RSS aggregator to harvest Atom (you need it for the Blogspot posts).
January 17th, 2006 at 18:05
Give me a shout if you need to talk WPMU at any point… I’m not great technically but I’ve got a pretty good understanding.
January 18th, 2006 at 10:02
Quick thing to look into: K2 doesn’t play well with IE. If your classroom terminals are IE based, you may need to tweak the theme out a bit to make it work.
Otherwise, sounds like a great idea. You might also want to look into a true content management system (CMS) like Drupal (http://drupal.org) or something else from http://www.opensourcecms.com. I am using a Drupal installation to manage a website for my school library system (http://sls.gvboces.org) that allows direct aggregation in a sidebar and other very cool things.
January 19th, 2006 at 21:15
I have been using Movable Type (Six Apart) as a content management system to feed websites for a few years. (I used Blogger to do the same years before they were purchased by Google). I now use Movable Type to feed the Grandview Elementary School Library website where I have taken a position as the Library Media Specialist. Every page is fed by one or more Movable Type “categories”. A great feature is the ability to associate the same post with multiple categories - hence the ability to show a book at mulitple grade levels when appropriate. You can feed multiple categories into the same page making it simple to include different content in different sections of the page. All of the “feeds” are created with templates pointing to the categories. I use Typepad for Mrs. Chauncey’s Blog — just because I enjoy some of its features. www.grandviewlibrary.org — Sarah
January 19th, 2006 at 23:44
Stephen- MagpieRSS parses Atom already.
You don’t always have to be doing this via RSS if it is sitting on the same server. One nice thing about Movabletype is you can set it up to publish just some simple text files on your server in a specified place, and your maiin page, if say it uses something like PHP, can simply embed the contetn via an include statement.
This is my approach for using MT to create a podcast publisher for different sub-sites (via category feeds):
http://cogdogblog.com/2005/10/21/podcast-pub/
Also in MT, you can use some of the plugins that allow you to have multiple bloigs share content; I’ve used the MTOtherBlog plug-in (http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/otherblog.php) for our Ocotillo Projject, so that the main page (it is a MT site) is automatically updated when any of the four subsidiary blogs is updated:
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2004/07/15/ocotillo.html
In someways you can do a bit more with MT because you can have one ppost generate all kinds of content files.
On th eother hand, you could find ways to have different WordPress sites perhaphs share the same database tables, and develop some custom code for the front page to grab specific items from the database.
Thanks for some of the other examples, which should appear in an upcoming presentation covering this very topic- using blogware for propeling sites that are not strictly blogs per se.
On the other hand, I really miss the smell of fresh dittos.
January 20th, 2006 at 06:31
I’m trying to start something similar at my school using WordPress. I’m trying to get people used to reading the blog format and then eventually using them. I’ve got one teacher using a blog to manage her homework page at http://byrdmiddle.org/hunnicutt. This type of webpage is something blogs are perfect for, far superior to SchoolNotes which is what a lot of my teachers use.
I also started a links/resource page (an attempt at a home brewed del.icio.us as the site is blocked by our filters) at http://byrdmiddle.org/links. Hopefully as these thing prove their worth I’ll be able to talk some people into allowing me to put WordPress on a school server rather than having to run it outside the system.
I’d like to get our school publishing announcements and the like to the main page using WordPress but I’ve run into the problem that we don’t have a decent (allowed) way to read the rss feeds. Bloglines is blocked and the two browsers we are allowed to have on the computers are the old IE for Macs and Safari in Panther. A frustrating situation.
January 20th, 2006 at 06:58
I, for one still look at RSS, PHP, Atom, Drupal etc. as terms happen only in the Alien’s Land.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Well, I am sure there are many teachers, lecturers who can sail through any technical stuff like a song! No problem!
Cindy
January 20th, 2006 at 13:32
LOL - true enough, Cindy. Sometimes the jargon around all of this prevents someone who is new to these topics from picking up on things too easily. Ironic, since we’re trying to do things that enable communication!