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.

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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!

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November 6, 2016 — Just like doctors make the worst patients, teachers make the worst students when it comes to running WordPress Multisite in a K-12 environment. This talk covers the trials and tribulations of implementing a scalable WP Multisite network on Windows servers (yes, Windows – running on a WIMP stack), and the hardest part of all – managing the content managers!

October 6, 2016 — This session shares the use of WordPress to support a undergraduate class in chemistry and how the online activities were carefully planned to compliment the face-to-face time with the Professor and classmates.

October 5, 2016 — Migracja ponad 4000 postów z Joomla 1.5 do WordpPress 4.0 i kolejnych (w miarę upływu czasu) w jednej z największych Bibliotek Publicznych w kraju. Przedstawienie problemów technicznych i organizacyjnych w kontekście niedofinansowanej jednostki budżetowej.

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August 28, 2016 — WordPress ofrece herramientas y oportunidades fantásticas para el mundo educativo. En esta ponencia aprenderemos de la mano de Fernando Tellado como aprovechar todo el potencial de WordPress en colegios, academias, escuelas superiores y universidades.

Eliminando los costes de licencias, con todo lo que ofrece WordPress y un poco de maña se pueden crear desde entornos de comunicación entre estudiantes y profesores, webs de proyecto, redes sociales para alumnos e incluso plataformas de formación completas.

El 25% de Internet funciona con WordPress, y el mundo educativo tiene la oportunidad de utilizar el más potente gestor web y de contenidos para ofrecer herramientas y un ecosistema completo para que profesores y alumnos aprovechen al máximo sus conocimientos con las aplicaciones del mundo profesional.

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August 24, 2016 — WordPress is the perfect solution for K-12 schools to communicate and connect with parents, alumni, donors and the community. Learn from practical examples what elements make a great school website and the best WordPress resources available to help you create a website that will both showcase your school and is easy to maintain.

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August 14, 2016 — The HBS Digital Initiative, in partnership with Reaktiv Studios, has been building a networked classroom blogging tool, called Open Knowledge. Our goal is to make Open Knowledge the destination to create, share, discover and engage in discussions about the future of business within the classroom and beyond.

Implementing such a platform within higher education requires specific technical and social considerations. What about FERPA? Do students feel comfortable doing work publicly and digitally? What back-end tools are need for grading and curation? How can conversations remain civil while also remaining public?

We will share our findings from the last year of design research, user testing, and iterative development. We’ll discuss the ways WordPress might be customized for use in a classroom setting, and then spend as much time as possible for Q&A. Our findings are incredibly compelling for broader implementation, and we are excited to help other schools figure out a similar roadmap!

August 14, 2016 — If you work with or within universities, you know that building applications to support higher education is not for the faint of heart. We’re dealing with legacy systems, homegrown access management and of course limited resources and endless demands from the academic community. But I’m not here to scare you! Instead we’ll talk about how to defeat the higher-ed hydra with WordPress features like multisite, roles and capabilities, theme frameworks, and the REST API. All of these were used and abused to wrangle formidable foes like Boston University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In this talk we’ll go through some strategies and examples that might work for you.

August 14, 2016 — WordPress in Higher Education panel discussion.