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.

These are the plugins we found most useful for our WordPressMU installation:

• Anarchy Media Player – Plays mp3, flv, mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp, avi, asf and wmv hypertext links directly on your webpage. Adds buttons to the post editor for embedding swf movies including Google Video etc. By An-archos.
• Search Everything – Adds search functionality with little setup. Including options to search pages, excerpts, attachments, drafts, comments and custom fields (metadata). By Dan Cameron.
• Yet another threaded Comments plugin – his comment allows to have newly created comments relate to existing comments, so you can comment on a comment. This information allows to display the Comments in a hierarchical fashion (e.g. a Tree). By Joachim Praetorius.
• Event Calendar – Manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar. You can subscribe to the calendar from iCal (OSX) or Sunbird. By Alex Tingle.
• PJW Mime Config – Allows you to extend the list of mime-types supported by the built-in uploader. By Peter Westwood
• LDAP Authentication Plug-in – Gives WordPress MU the ability to authenticate against a LDAP server (Users are automatically created).
  • Alistair Young – Original LDAP Plug-in
  • Patrick Cavit – WordPress 1.5.1 Modifcation of LDAP Plug-in
  • Hugo Salgado – WordPress 2.0.3 Patch of WordPress 1.5.1 Modifcation of LDAP Plug-in
  • Alex Barker – WordPress MU 1.0 Modifcation of LDAP Plug-in (Windows Support With Contribution From Dexter Arver)
• Privacy Options – Adds a couple more privacy options to the options-privacy page. Just drop in mu-plugins, no core edits needed. By D Sader
• WP Latex Math – Modified based Anders Dahnielson, Use $latex your-math-code$ tags to embed LaTeX math in posts. By Patrick Chia

Without all of these incredible plugins our blogs would not be possible!