August 15, 2017 — WordPress in Higher Education

August 15, 2017 — Dawson College, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada with 10,000+ students and 1,000+ faculty and staff has adopted WordPress as our primary web publishing platform. We’ve mostly had success, but we’ve also had our share of failures and growing pains. In this case study, I’m going to talk about how we started out with WordPress in 2010, migrated our main website a few years later to a multi-site install and how it all evolved to what we have today. Since then, we’ve adopted the “lean and mean” mantra to building sites, while making them easy to update. This case study will showcase the front and back-ends of our higher profile sites to show how we achieved our goals. We’ll also explain how we manage expectations, do our development, choose plugins and tools, and which themes we’ve come to rely on.

Presentation Slides »

April 3, 2017 — I’ll briefly discuss how things got started from a single testing site and progressed to the current single and multisite WordPress deployment used today. I’ll outline the reasoning, history, and evolution that has lead our team to focus on using WordPress in a collaborative environment to meet the needs of our multifaceted audience. Some parts also include leadership “buy-in”, training, support, and continual maintenance. I plan to allow plenty of time for questions.

March 18, 2017 — The web created the first universal publishing platform but schools, of all levels, are still having students submit paper or “electronic documents” for grading and review. Academic work lives in private, closed systems, never exposing students to the opportunity of external feedback.

This session will propose a different approach. We require incoming college freshmen to become publishers during their first few weeks in school. They create websites and use that publishing platform to post personal reflections, current event updates … and all of their assignments. The website becomes a repository for what will be a portfolio of assignments by the time a student graduates.

Our approach could work for any discipline, but it will take a change of mindset and the acquisition of new skills and infrastructure. It’s time to change the culture of education by creating college graduates that are media literate, proficient web publishers and good digital citizens.

March 16, 2017 — So-called digital natives might pick up tech skills easily, but that doesn’t mean they intuit everything tech-related – there is plenty to teach and learn, especially when it comes to a robust storytelling tool like WordPress. Teaching high school students how to properly design, set up, and launch a WordPress blog and how to tell their stories powerfully to a target audience, with good writing and high-quality multimedia, gives them a mighty perch from which to sing. I’ll explain the step-by-step process I’ve used to teach teens to become WordPress bloggers.

December 11, 2016 — Learn how Newark Public Schools (NJ’s largest school district 40,000 students; 70 schools) cut their annual web site technology budget in half by migrating to WordPress from a closed-source, proprietary, expensive, vendor-controlled SaaS CMS.

Hear stories from the trenches about budget battles, angry/clueless technology vendors and frustrated administrators from one guy with a vision to disrupt the market and bring better web site technology to our public schools using a WordPress-Powered SaaS called SchoolPress.

Case studies will be presented for three districts (2 in NJ, 1 in TX) that migrated to WordPress.

December 8, 2016 — Dawson College with 10,000+ students and 1,000+ faculty and staff has adopted WordPress as our primary web publishing platform. We’ve mostly had success, but we’ve also had our share of failures and growing pains. In this case study, I’m going to talk about how we started out with WordPress in 2010, migrated our main website a few years later to a multi-site install and how it all evolved to what we have today. Since then, we’ve adopted the “lean and mean” mantra to building sites, while making them easy to update. This case study will showcase the front and back-ends of our higher profile sites to show how we achieved our goals. We’ll also explain how we manage expectations, do our development, choose plugins and tools, and which themes we’ve come to rely on.

Presentation Slides »

November 20, 2016 — In her talk, Rose will discuss the impact of open source technology, content management systems, the dynamic nature of WordPress and how her students impressions of WordPress change over time.

In addition to her educational efforts, Rose spends her free time volunteering with dog rescue organizations and spending time with her family.

November 11, 2016 — Learn how Newark Public Schools (NJ’s largest school district – 40,000 students; 70 schools) cut their annual web site technology budget in half by migrating to WordPress from a closed-source, proprietary, expensive, vendor-controlled SaaS CMS. Hear stories from the trenches about budget battles, angry/clueless technology vendors and frustrated administrators from one guy with a vision to disrupt the market and bring better web site technology to our public schools using a WordPress-Powered SaaS called SchoolPress. Case studies will be presented for three districts (2 in NJ, 1 in TX) that migrated to WordPress.

Presentation Slides »

November 7, 2016 — My wife recently launched a new WordPress Multisite network for the Cherokee County School District in Georgia, which encompasses 40+ schools and serves more than 41,000 K-12 students. For some of the deeper coding, she enlisted my aid to help bend WordPress Multisite to her will.

From adding custom BootStrap CSS column classes to nav menu items, to automagically including a custom stylesheet for each school site, to denying content editor access to specific parts of the dashboard, these and several other code snippets will be covered.

Featured code snippet: the “redirect_naughty_children()” function. Get out of my Dashboard, you darn kids!

Presentation Slides »