edsysad.org

It has been a long summer of silence and I’m excited to get writing again.

After finishing my Masters program his Spring, I needed a break to regain some enthusiasm and perspective. As fate would have it, a wonderful project has fallen into my lap and appears to be a great place to spend my “cognitive surplus” now that school is over.

My school district is using some calendaring software and a wiki to create an electronic curriculum guide. It is an exciting project because we are trying to take a number of great web-based tools to capture our district institutional knowledge. It is a pretty bold initiative, but so far it looks great and has incredible promise. I’ll talk more about it later as the details become more public.

At my individual site, we’ve made some great progress with teacher blog use and are now focusing on student blog use. While the staff isn’t ready to open the doors completely on student blogging, I’m currently developing a WordpressMU server as a structured portfolio for student writing. My eventual goal is to take the work that I’m doing and somehow turn it into a plugin. Initial testing suggests that the appropriate hooks are available to make this happen, but I have yet to determine if my programming skills are up to the the challenge of writing a plugin.

I would love to here from anybody that is interested in using WordpressMU for student portfolios.

At the conference, I presented the blogging project that has been active at my school for the last year. I talked about some the plugins we found very useful, but this post meant to gather them in one place. (more…)

Recently, I’ve been working quite extensively with WordpressMU. I’ve developed our school and teacher websites using it as the backbone. Recently, I started working with teachers to create project and topic specific blogs for instruction. The problem was there wasn’t a quick and easy way to import large numbers of users (i.e. classlists) into newly created blogs.

Dagon Design and Nicholas LaRacuente had developed a very nice plugin for importing users with just a username and emai. Unfortunately, this did not import existing blog users. I added a few lines of code to their work and now it adds both existing and new users during an import. This means you can dump classlists from you student info system and import right into your blogs.

This plugin comes without warrant. Use it at your own risk!

Edsysad mod of Dagon Design plugin