Re: [school-discuss] Postnuke (was Moodle)

[William Fragakis <william@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If there are any PostNuke (CMS) users out there, we have added a number 
of educational modules to our installation plus a number of good core 
PostNuke modules.

While we are still running ver. 0.726, there should be little or no 
problem going up to .75 or .76 with just a few mods along the way.

The php needs to be cleaned up and a lot of content moved to lang 
(language) files - as I added/modded originally just for our own use 
but I've added enough school-based modules, it is probably time to turn 
it loose. Also, a number of admin functions for modded modules needs to 
be stronger as some of it (such as mod inits) is done by hand.

We've done adaptations of modules and some new ones:

Classrooms Online: the module that handles the teachers' web pages 
within the web site. Allows them to enable/disable various modules on 
their page. Assembles information from various modules for their home 
page.

Class Contact: Simple mail form so students can email teachers

Weekly Assignments: Simple Weekly "Calendar" for listing homework, 
class activities, etc for the week
Day Plan: Lays out the daily schedule (eg 8am Reading, 9:15 Math) in a 
table and ends the vexing three hrs teachers spend at the beginning of 
the year trying to do it in Word
Month Plan: a very simple calendar showing key events for the class - 
only displays weekdays (We use PostCalendar for school wide events. 
It's overkill for classroom needs, though, imho)

These three modules stand alone and are also incorporated into the 
teacher's home page so if you visit the page at noon on Wed, you can 
see what activity they usually do on Wednesday's at noon -   and 
whatever the teacher may have planned special for the day. The home 
page also lists recent teacher articles.

We've modded Stories to hard code 4 topics and make it easy for the 
teacher to publish in those topics: Homework, Events, Parents, 
Curriculum

We've modded Sections so teachers have a separate way to create Section 
articles for their page, ie "About Me", etc. As a separate module, we 
can associate the Section with a teacher id (and therefore correct 
homepage)

We've modded ew_filemanager to not only give teachers space on the web 
server to store documents but modded two additional directories. The 
first is BeeBoard (our mascot is the bee), which allows teachers to 
drop documents in a specific directory and then have the web site list 
the contents for visitors - handy for uploading homework rubrics, etc. 
The second is DropBox, which allows students and parents to upload 
files to another directory so homework can be sent from home (we're 
still using floppies). The file name is concatenated with the sender's 
name and time stamp to avoid overwriting similar files (too many 
"homework.doc"s).

We've created a module where teachers can store, edit and send to a 
list of emails ie. parent emails.

Modded Web Links so teachers can assign certain links to their class. 
We keep all web links in a "library". This way, good links aren't lost 
each year when teachers redo their pages and good links are shared 
across the school.

Journal update and mod to link with a teacher.

Gallery modded so teachers can easily create their albums within 
gallery, upload pictures and identifies and links teacher albums with 
their home page.

Conferences - a simple conference scheduler allowing parents to sign up 
for time slots for parent/teacher conferences.


I've probably left out a few more mods/hacks/new modules but hope this 
helps.


Regards,
William Fragakis
Morris Brandon Elementary, Atlanta, GA USA
www.morrisbrandon.com