🔖 PressForward in the classroom

Bookmarked PressForward in the classroom (pressforward.org)

Do you want to work with students to publish class assignments or research? Instructors use PressForward in the classroom to consolidate and review student assignments, help students learn to survey their fields, and create opportunities for collaboration, communication, and research. The Lewis & Clark College Environmental Studies Program produces Environment Across Boundaries, a student-led publication that cultivates interdisciplinary perspectives on environmental issues. Participation gives students an opportunity to engage with their discipline through experiential, project based learning. They develop skills both in their field and with a suite of digital tools.

An interesting use case for PressForward: creating a “planet” website to aggregate and/or showcase work of students in an entire classroom who are all posting content to their own separate web spaces.

Sketch idea: create a standalone WordPress site for a course, install the PressForward plugin, input the RSS feeds for students’ websites to aggregate all their work collectively into one space. Various ideas include:

Use the feed for students and teacher to keep up with the entire classroom.

Publish an OPML file for students to easily subscribe to all feeds in their feed reader of choice.

Optionally publish the highlights of the best work or even all of it.

Teachers could use the feed to check that students are posting/keeping up with assignments for grading purposes.

Use the read/unread functionality to “mark” pieces as graded/ungraded or seen/unseen.

Use the internal commenting system to keep private notes on student’s work.

Create output feeds for specific tags and/or categories

Works with any student sites that produce feeds, not just WordPress, so students have choices of different CMSes.

Use the nomination functionality to quickly aggregate and disseminate online sources for classroom assignments or readings.

I had contemplated planet like aggregation at the recent WPCampus online conference. It’s interesting to see that PressForward has considered it as a use case as well though I’d love to hear about or see examples of this in the wild.

How else could this rich, multi-functional Swiss Army knife-like plugin be used in education?

Diagram of PressForward functionality as a content hub or “planet” courtesy of PressForward.org