NBCHS goes Drupal

http://stigmergicweb.org/2007/03/23/nbchs-goes-drupal/

I recently updated the NBCHS website to Drupal. Although I had planned the change for some time, the final impetus for getting it done was a mass IP address renumbering throughout the school division, which broke some of our existing links and DNS entries.

So far, the site is pretty basic. I haven’t changed from the default Garland theme, but it looks pretty good and matches our school colours. I’ve only added a few modules - Marksmarty, Pathauto, Scheduler and Webcal. The Drupal part of the site has a bit of content that I’ve brought in from existing pages, but is mostly used to link to existing content. The best things about using Drupal (so far) is the ease of adding important information for the community to the main page, and having the daily announcements set up so that it is easy for other staff in the building to edit. My goal is to avoid being stuck with the webmaster role in which everyone in the school gets me to add content. I’m planning on working with some of the early technology adopters to start using the system, then demonstrate to others that it is worth their time to learn how to add content. Teachers don’t have a lot of extra time to spend learning new technology skills, unless there is a benefit to our students.

I have a few other plans. I don’t think we are ready to offer blogs for every student, but I hope that teachers would start by at least using a blog as an assignment page. I’d like to see some of the student groups starting to use the site. I’d really like to start adding some photos to the site, although I’m not sure about the best way to handle that.