Thread

Hello all!

I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that I can’t use EE to do what I want, which makes me very sad. I’d like the 30 students in my class to each have their own web page within a site so that they can post answers to questions I ask them, journal entries to prompts I’ve given them, and go to the pages of other students to post responses.

Possible? Or outside the license?

Jake

Sounds to me that setting up 30 blogs (with 30 template groups so each student has his/her own URL) seems like the way to go.
If it’s for education I’m sure you can make a deal with Leslie if that would go against the license.

Thanks, e-man! I’ll try to contact Leslie to ask for permission.

Also, would it be possible for me to create a page that gave me snippets of each kids posts from all 30 pages for that day? Or full posts so I could just scroll through one page making comments?

Thanks again!

Sure, I can’t see why that would be a problem, it could end up being a very long page though 😊

Pardon me for rambling…

Have you considered using a pre-fab platform made specifically for educators, like Moodle? Or using a hosted wiki like PBwiki? You also might consider just setting up a forum, using EE or something else, where every student gets their own topic.

It may be easier than fiddling with EE. It is flexible enough to do just about anything, and, yes, can do everything you mention. I just don’t know how hard it will be and how long it will take you. It can quickly become a really complicated project. Are you willing to give the time and endure some headaches to get exactly what you want? If your answer is yes, EE is for you and will be great.

But if the answer is no, I’d check out alternatives before you dive in. There may be other, better things like Moodle designed for educators, I just don’t know about them. And they may be ugly, may not be able to do exactly what you want, so you may have to adapt. But they could be ready to go pretty much right out of the box. If you don’t have a good amount of web design experience, and don’t have a lot of time, think about not using EE for this project.

Caveat- what you describe for a online classroom sounds intriguing and good. If someone hasn’t made it already, someone should. I’ve found that education websites and software are usually bloated, unwieldy, and seem to be designed by people who really don’t really “get” the web - but that’s a whole’nother sermon. What I’m trying to say is this- if you want to do the work to make your dream come true, go for it with EE.

Anyway, good luck.

@ e-man: Thanks, man! I figured it could be done and as I was reading your post I realized, that at least this school year, I’d be crazy to try to set that up. Instead, I realized I could just grab the rss feeds from each of my kids pages and put them in my feed reader. Then I’ll know that way if they’ve posted that day or not.

@ oldgoldback: Thanks for the post. I had, in fact, looked at some other alternatives but they did not include moodle or pbwiki. I had looked primarily at edublogs.org which offers a nice service, but if you want to utilize their tools on your own server in a secure environment, you have to pay a minimum of $600 for 30 kids. I have to look at my class list, but I think I may have 32 or 33 this year which puts me in the next price bracket. Yikes.

Yes, this is a great idea for the classroom, however it is not new with me. It’s kind of taking the education world by storm. It seems to keep the kids quite engaged and is a great setting for group work and collaboration.

I need to look at moodle and pbwiki more closely as they may meet my needs. The largest issue I’m facing is that our administrator doesn’t want the student blogs to be public, which most schools don’t seem to concerned with, particularly if the schools name isn’t used and the kids use pen names or something. I’m not sure how this could provide fodder for predators with those types of things in place. Nevertheless, it needs to be secure, allowing access only to those within the school community, which is why I was thinking EE. I actually just did a basic project in EE for a business client so I feel confident enough in my noob skill set to get it up and running fairly quickly.

Thanks, guys for your time. Greatly appreciated!

Ha, yes, though it sounds like you knew a lot more than me, I did in fact know that student blogs was not your idea 😊. I just haven’t seen it done well, and in your description of what you wanted, I was imagining great things for a super implementation.

Another wiki option I forgot to mention is Wikidot—it’s not as slick, but more robust and it hosts private wikis for free with all sorts of fun settings for specifying what each individual can do. pbWiki also hosts private for free, but I don’t recall their privacy settings being as extensive. Of course, those are wikis, not blogs. But they could be up and running by dinner time. And Moodle is software that needs to be hosted, like EE I’m sure you could secure it well. I wouldn’t be worried about predators, but there is something that doesn’t seem right about publishing kids’ schoolwork publicly.

Hey, it’s worth a shot in EE if you feel comfortable with it. Though likely not as easy as a wiki, just giving everyone a basic blog shouldn’t be too bad. And you can adjust and improve along the way during the massive amounts of free time you teachers get 😉. So maybe I misunderstood your ambitions.

I think you need the EE personal license for the membership stuff (and the free tech support is nice), but it’s entirely within the scope of that.

I’ll mention edublogs (http://edublogs.org) as a possible solution.

I had looked primarily at edublogs.org which offers a nice service, but if you want to utilize their tools on your own server in a secure environment, you have to pay a minimum of $600 for 30 kids. I have to look at my class list, but I think I may have 32 or 33 this year which puts me in the next price bracket. Yikes.

😊

$600 (about $500 in USD) is highway robbery. And then it scales up by users? Charging schools like that- shameful.

You looked at the “premium” package.  But, TNSTAAFL…  Build it yourself if the free service doesn’t offer what you want.  I’m sure you’ll have more than $500 invested when through.  😉  (Unless you’re time isn’t worth anything.)

BTW:  I’m not affiliated with edublogs, just know it to be a reliable service.

Please don’t think I’m looking for a free lunch. If I was I wouldn’t be looking at EE. (I’m trying to convince my wife that $100 out of my own pocket is money well spent for my kids.) What edublogs.org is offering in their premium service is EXACTLY what I’m looking for. Unlimited bandwidth and storage for 35 users? For $500 US? In a secure environment? Goodness, that’s amazing. If I get my kids podcasting and vidcasting newsreel type stuff then that is money well spent. The problem is, neither I nor my school can afford that price. Wish I could. Believe me. But if I’m having a hard time convincing my wife on the $100 (a one time cost), then $500 per year is not going to fly.

You’re right. $500 per year is nothing compared to the countless, I mean countless hours it would take me to build my own version of something like this. There is no way I could do it and teach at the same time. I wish they offered a scaled down version. Limited bandwidth maybe? No podcasting? For $100 a year? Then I’d buy.

Expression Engine, thank you for being here. You may save me a lot of time! I want my students to have the best education possible and you may be a significant tool in my toolbox. By the way, do you provide educational discounts? 😊

Thanks again, guys, for all the options you’ve thrown my way today. I’m grateful.

jakelyman, I’m 99% certain that such a use would not be outside of the license, at least not the spirit of the license, but I’ll leave that to the EE crew to confirm.

You wouldn’t actually need to use 30+ blogs. Unless you want your students to change the design of their individual blog, you could pretty easily do this using usernames and url segments to give the illusion of different pages all based on the same template or template group.

eg: using your username (actually your screen name, just pretend it is also your username) as an example, the url (index.php removed), http://www.myschool.org/blogs might show all blog entries from all teachers and students, but the url http://www.myschool.org/blogs/jakelyman could easily be used to show just your entries (plus comments etc) just by adding the username parameter to the weblog entries tag

{exp:weblog:entries  weblog="class_of_2007"  orderby="date"  limit="15" username="{segment_2}"}
content
{/exp:weblog:entries}

This is a really simple example, but with some careful planning, you can provide a customised individual page for each student. There is a bunch of stuff you can customise, even maybe throw some custom member fields into the mix (to allow students to choose from a menu of external news feed, for example that might appear in the sidebar of their page) Use a login protected standalone entry form for entries.

you could pretty easily do this using usernames and url segments to give the illusion of different pages all based on the same template or template group.

Tim! Some really good ideas here. Could make things simple for this year so we’re up and running quickly. I’ve never used url segments. How would I go about doing this? Do you assign a specific url to a specific page within the template group?

username=”{segment_2}”

I understand everything in the code snipet you gave me except for this part. What does “{segment_2}” mean?

I think I understand most of this Tim. The last bit that’s confusing to me is your last paragraph. I’m not up to that type of customization yet! But I’m willing to work through it. What do you mean by a login protected standalone entry form for entries?

Thanks so much for weighing in on this!

Jake

I love EE and think it is the best product ever, but I keep thinking that Wordpress MU might be a little more what you are looking for. Also I am pretty sure that is the software that Edublogs runs.

Well, we’ve managed to thoroughly complicate this, huh?

Wordpress MU is a good idea. Yes, it is what Edublogs runs and it’s free. I’m not really familiar with it though. The question is- Will it setup quickly for you with templates and all? But will it be much less complicated than EE to implement. Free is good though.

Tim’s idea is good, but does that run on core? Because then it would be perfect. And not terrible to develop if you stay away from customizing each student’s page. I’ve never used core though…

EDIT: You still have to host these things though. Hopefully you don’t have to pay for that. And it’s too bad your school can’t swing the $100 bucks. If it works, it could be expanded to let any teacher use it… And yes, Jake, you do not get paid nearly what you’re time and efforts are worth.