A wide range of services provided

How can this system actually be used by schools?

Courtesy of Userland: There are a number of ways that this technology is used by academic institutions. Here are some examples: Distance Learning The system must be capable of supporting a large number of users, but also be simple and intuitive for students and faculty to use. It must also be highly flexible to meet a growing list of requirements. This system allows you to support a network of thousands of websites. Membership features make it easy for faculty members to maintain a list of their students and send the occasional email bulletin or newsletter. Students can be added in bulk or individually. Peer review can take place before the work is made available to the larger community or the content can be remain private. Threaded Discussion Forums are supported and facilitate the interchange of ideas. Because RSS is built-in, every single site can have its own RSS feed and list of subscriptions specific to the activities on that site. What a great way to keep up with current events or the work going on in other departments. Writing Workshops This system is uniquely suited to facilitating writing workshops. For example, a "story" can serve as the assignment page. Students can receive the assignment either in an email with a link or through RSS. Documents and other existing instructional material can be made available as well that are specific to the assignment. Discussion can take place in the discussion forum to help students explore and better understand the assignment. The instructor can field questions and point students with the same questions to relevant posts. Drafts can be reviewed by the instructor prior to release to the class. Students can then be allowed to comment on each others work. Comment moderation by the instructor ensures this exchange remains constructive. Additionally, a plug-in is available that will place two different languages side-by-side for multi-lingual writing assignments. As the instructor, you are only limited by your imagination. Alumni Outreach There is no better way to stay in touch with alumni than blogs with RSS. Post news and events to this type of site, host a directory of faculty and alumni, conduct surveys, or better yet, allow the alumni to remain in touch with each other by providing this type of forum for their use. Use membership forms to keep alumni contact information current and allow past students to remain in touch with favorite professors by subscribing to their blogs. These kinds of activities will keep the alumni community current and interested in their alma mater. Visit Weblogs at Harvard Law, hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. School News and Events The world has come to recognize the web as the best way to publish information on current activities and events. Check out Rock Island School District's news site. This system makes it simple. Use our Calendar Plug-In to publish information on future events and then link to the specifics on another page. Allow people to sign up for the events and send them a bulletin prior to the event. Then follow up the events by posting news items to the site - pictures or a podcast. If your readers use iCal on the Mac or Outlook in MS Windows, they can subscribe to a site's calendar and be updated when new items are posted. Professor Blogs Here's an example of what Dr. Robert Borofsky is doing with this system in the area of public anthropology. This is a collection of private sites, each set up to support Instructors and students using Dr. Borofsky's book, "Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn From It". Each school gets its own private site that is created using a custom theme. This theme includes several pages with questions and other information. Students log in and post answers to assigned questions in the Discussion Group. this system is flexible and can easily be adapted to a variety of uses, including automatically subscribing students to receive email notification when someone posts a comment on their answer. Students reportedly enjoy reading and commenting on each other's answers. They claimed that it enhanced the experience and that they learned more than they would have otherwise. You can visit the site by clicking here. Faculty Directory and Faculty Sites This system's feature set makes it a great choice for the faculty directory. The ability to easily create a separate website for each faculty member makes the directory come alive. As a result of the Edit This Page functionality, the directory is constantly being updated by the people most interested in keeping it current - the faculty member. It also adds a personal touch allowing them to place relevant content were it can be found most quickly by students, administrators, alumni, and other faculty members. The De Anza Faculty Directory for De Anza College in Cupertino, California uses this system for most faculty sites and it's a great example of how it works in this role. # Posted by Lee Baker from the Promotion dept. Comment [0] Trackback [151] Discuss

Why use this system?

Simply because it is a light-weight and easy to use website and weblog publishing system used by academic institutions all over the world to create and edit web content, collaborate on projects, manage online discussion groups and share documents.  Using it, hundreds of of existing academic customers can: create and edit websites and intranets using Edit this Page functionality create a single weblog or a community of up to several thousand weblogs manage discussion groups and email lists administer online student writing projects host and manage podcasts facilitate online student / teacher information and coursework sharing facilitate online parent / teacher communication syndicate and aggregate content using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) leverage an amazing host of web publishing features for a fraction of the price of competitive content management systems It provides the ideal platform for creating and managing course catalogues, curriculum updates, required reading lists, course syllabus and assignments, student discussion groups, as well as a framework for collaborative writing assignments. In addition, it provides the capability for course surveys, files of any type (including podcasts), opinion polls, and the occasional student bulletin.  Using it to publish to the web, educators can "say it once" for everyone to see and solicit real-time feedback and information sharing. This system has a long history of working with academic institutions and we offer our academic customers special pricing and services.  Special offers include: Annual pricing Hosted student weblogs An open offer to consult with educators to design new offerings and custom implementations to meet emerging academic and student needs Contact us to discuss your special needs. Explore the power of this system today. It is available for Windows Vista, XP, 2000, 2003, NT and 98, and for MacOS X. It offers one-click localisation to Danish, Dutch, German, French, and Italian. Courtesy of Userland. # Posted by Lee Baker from the Promotion dept. Comment [0] Trackback [12] Discuss

5.2.2012

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