I'm giving Elgg a try as a blogging tool for Year 6 in my school, as an alternative to our usual 'design your website' topic for ICT lessons.
Today was the first day I let the pupils loose on the system!
Setting things up on the server was pretty straightforward, although I seem to be missing the manual from my distribution ;-)
Ours being a primary school, a little hackery has been required, to remove the public access option and user registration now that we've got the first cohort in place. Having just set up SSO for Moodle, e-mail and windows, it's a shame not to be able to do the same for elgg, although I believe this is on the agenda for v 0.3. Similarly, being able to create bulk accounts would have made the focus of today's session more content than process!
The pupils are quite excited by the prospects and potential, and love the idea that they're testing v 0.2, alpha release code! We didn't get much further than filling in our profiles, but they love the linking to other's pages where there are shared interests. We'd like to hide some of the fields on the profile page, next time round though.
Next lesson is a week hence, but it's going to be interesting to see whether any of them play with it in the meantime. Also, any way to get our hands on more templates, like the ones on this site?
September 14, 2005
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Comments
It is great to see you using Elgg and we look forward to following your progress.
We are hoping to have SSO ready for the v0.3 release. You raise an important issue which will not make this release but will certainly be considered for the future and that is the ability to create bulk accounts. We will be looking for ways to auto populate your Elgg from, say, your Moodle course or WebCT etc. This will greatly reduce the frustration and time to enter all accounts individually.
"We'd like to hide some of the fields on the profile page, next time round though." - This is an easy procedure within the code but perhaps it is something we should consider for the administration panel? It might be useful for installations to be able to both set what they want the fields to be and the ones they want to display?
"Also, any way to get our hands on more templates, like the ones on this site?"
We will be bundling all the new templates on this site with the next release v0.3 - due out Sept 26th. You will be able to upgrade and use these. In the meantime if you need a couple feel free to take them from this site - although I know the process is slow it would mean you could get them now.
regards,
David W