TomJohnson

RyeBrye,

Thanks for your comment. I used WebCT at a university I previously taught at and I hated it too — seems like those systems try to make web building easy, but in reality they are just another system to learn, no harder than actual html.

Re legal issues, yes, this is on my radar. I didn’t know there were actual privacy laws that included this, though. Thanks. I sure wish there were a grading plugin of some kind. This seems to be the only thing that WordPress lacks.

Thanks ptvguy for your thoughtful response. I took note of your caution with my posting of the access username and password and decided to change that password. I haven’t ready any policy against using public sites for student work, but when introducing something new and innovative, making it secure and private is one less hurdle.

About not dumbing down the administrative interface, your comment about risking hard crashes if I play around with the dashboard/admin features too much made me nervous. One of my fears is that I’ll screw something up and accidentally delete all the posts and grades for the entire semester. Will installing the admin menu plugin (that creates a menu on the top bar for logged in users) really risk my admin’s functionality?

About dumbing down to student’s level, well, I have to admit I’m teaching at a technical college and the students are by nature technical. However, they have to fiddle around with it a bit first. For example, one student was trying to edit his post and kept looking for it in the admin menu. I finally told him to go view his post and click an Edit button. But I agree that it is teaching them a good, useful skill.

About the categories, I might just assign a default category each week, when students write their essays. That way they won’t have to worry about it.

The wordpress blog worked well the first day of class. Students did say that having to select a category was not very intuitive. This was by far the most complicated thing I ran into — students usually did not select the right category. They said I should make the dashboard more user friendly eliminating a lot of the unnecessary stuff and making it more easy/direct to use. Any suggestions for modifying the dashboard?

(to see the site, go to http://www.idratherbewriting.com/itt and sign on as guest for the username and password.)

Yes, I have plans to package it up as a class writing theme and write some instructions for teachers, but I want to make sure it works well first.

Thanks Samboll for your response to my possible concerns. Having students paste into Notepad first will be a pain. Is there any kind of plugin that would help cut out unwanted Word tags?

Barring that, here’s another question. Suppose a student has the WordPress text editor open for 2 hrs while writing a post. Is there a point at which WordPress times out, causing an error message when the student clicks Publish?

Tom

Actually, I mean is there anyway I can click a person’s name and see all comments that person has made? For example, if I enter

<?php list_authors(TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, FALSE, ‘RSS’); ?>

I can see all the authors and their posts. Isn’t there a similar tag for viewing all the author’s comments?

When you password protect posts, or make them private, do they still show up in searches?

I hadn’t anticipated so much hesitation about the public display of one’s academic essays. Why would students not want others to see their writing? The only reason might be if the writing is poor or personal. But you guys are bloggers, and you’re expressing concern about it, then hmmm. I’ll have to give this issue more attention.