Drupal Schools Network

Supporting Drupal in K-12 Settings

Drupal is not easy.  Without an in-house expert or a big budget for outside help, schools cannot make their sites do the powerful things Drupal can.

Empowering students to help is an important step, but even tech-savvy students need help, and the discussions on drupal.org require significant open source savvy to follow.  By the time students figure out how navigate those boards to solve problems, they are ready to graduate; and though they may be tempted to continue to help afterwards, college can be a distraction.

K12 schools that use Drupal need a place to Help each other:

• Learn how to do things and solve problems, and
• Share ideas for teaching and learning. 

Let the Drupal Schools Network be that space:  a place for educators and school stakeholders in Drupal schools to find each other and share teaching ideas and tech support.  Please join us!

PERTINENT POSTS:

Connecting with HS kids

HS / younger kids need to be connected to with things they can relate to. Not being horribly removed from HS (time wise) and remebering back to then as well as what I've seen w/ students now in general....

1. Make Drupal seem like something that they not only could use but may already interact with without knowing it. Example: The Flickr Clone that Lullabot training has made people build before. Not saying you should have the kids build it, but build a simple service like that or a you-tube clone to show them they can also make something cool and socially active like that.

2. Integrate the project w/ other social services. Twitter / facebook / youtube all have modules and pulling things together as mash-ups in interesting ways can be a good way to connect. A lot of students aren't going to go "OH WOW I can build Views from this!" They'll say "cool I can pull together twitter and youtube feeds!".

3. Lastly and I've seen this time and time again. Draw a logical connection between programming in general and the financial benefit / job security it can often bring. Market's down / off right now and kids / parents are going to want to be pushing their children into more "secure" higher education tracks. Less humanities (not that they aren't useful, i'm talking percetions here) and more business / technology. Make the business case for Drupal for them in terms of free-lance, corporate and education sectors that it's taking off in right now.

Learning in the Open

I've been thinking a lot lately about the power of transparent learning or learning in the open. With blogs, twitter, wikis, and other social media tools, our ability to share what we're learning with others has increased dramatically. The shift from learning in private to learning in public is dramatic and chaotic, much like swimming from the edge of a river into the fast flowing current. All of a sudden you're being pushed and tumbled along much faster than before.

I'm reading a book by Albert Bandura this semster called "Social Learning Theory." Bandura was a psychologist in the mid to late 20th century who researched the role of social modeling on human motivation, thought, and action. A lot of what I'm reading supports what I've experienced with learning in the open.

Here's some of what he wrote on social modeling:

Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action. Because people can learn from example what to do, at least in approximate form, before performing any behavior, they are spared needless errors.

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