Update/Note: This post has been re-written to reflect that I no longer teach using this site. In addition, the site detailed in this post used Joomla version 1.3. Therefore, some of the capabilities and limitations of Joomla described below may no longer apply. Also, the example websites described below are no longer active. I keep this post published in the hope that it may provide a few ideas for teachers currently working with the software. If you build a Joomla site for your classroom, your experiences and links are welcomed in the comments.

I used Joomla (previously Mambo) to run an “interactive” website for students in AP English, humanities, and creative writing classes at my school. This provided some “social” web work before the term caught on. I found that with additional extensions, the site provided a pretty excellent (though not perfect) social learning environment.

In case there are others searching for a way to move their students online, I thought I’d give an overview of what I found great and not-so-great about using Joomla as a solution.

WHAT WORKS WELL

First of all, Joomla can provide an excellent “walled garden” for students, and it’s particularly suited for creating a social network built around a discussion forum. Here’s how we used it:

Profile System: This was the heart of site (thanks to Community Builder). Each student had a profile to collect their work on the site and their links to other sites. In our install, students used the following tabs:

• Comments: Like most social networks, students could leave comments; I didn’t attach any “assignments” to this–I think building a genuine community is part of the point.
• About Me: Provided text boxes for students to share information. (An early requirement in the course was to complete the “about me” tab in a way that revealed the student’s personality and interests). These areas allowed for HTML, so that opened up room for even more creativity.
• Contact Info: This tab mainly provided links to other off-site pages, such as the student’s Google Reader Shared Items page, del.icio.us archive, and Elggspaces profile.
• Course Info: Students listed other courses they’re taking.
• Profile Gallery: Students could upload images.
• Connections: This worked like the “friends” feature of most social networks.
• Blog Entries: This tab collected all the blog entries students submitted to the site blog.
• Forum Posts: This tab collected all the forum posts students submitted.
• E-Writings: This extension allowed students to upload their writing, leave reviews and ratings, and discuss the writings in the forum.
• MyBeyond: This extension allowed students to create HTML pages or to build other pages that collect RSS feeds, mp3 files, and images. We used this as a way to construct an ePortfolio that collected the student’s “best work” throughout the year.

Members List: Students could browse through all the members of the site, sort by grade level or class, or search by name.

Messaging: Students could send on-site messages through each others’ profiles, or send emails through a form to other students. The actual email address of each student is protected in both cases. Only if a student replies to another student from their email account will their email address be revealed.

Forum: We used Joomlaboard to run the forum. It was simple but effective for our purposes. Each post showed the student’s avatar and linked back to his/her profile. The forum used BB code to format text and insert links, and students could attach image and text files to a post as well as “subscribe” to topics to receive emails about new posts on that topic. Only the “Course Forums” had an assignment attached to them. The other forums were available for students to use or ignore (another aspect of building community). We allowed posts to appear immediately without approval, but the option to approve each post did exist.

The assignment for the English 10 and English 11 forums were similar: pay attention to popular culture, the news, your friends, etc. and make connections between these things and the theme for the course. In English 10, the theme was “perceptions of truth, beauty, and goodness” in cultures around the world; in English 11, the theme was “perceptions of American cultural identity” as defined by various groups. The teachers who shared this site with me found this approach very effective. Initially, students were unsure how to proceed, of course, so we would provide examples. Eventually, students caught on and were soon adding lengthy and insightful posts that made connections between the works, themes, and concepts we were discussing in class and the things they observed and experienced outside the classroom.

Site Blog: We gave students “author” privileges and used the “submit news” feature that comes with Joomla to create the site blog. We used it as a way to allow students to post about topics that would interest most of the users of the site, or for teachers to post site announcements or other information that students may find interesting or helpful. The only limitation was that each post sent from a student had to be approved before it would appear. However, if you’re using Joomla as a walled garden, that might be perceived as a benefit.

Wiki: Wate used MamboWiki, which was really just a bridge install of MediaWiki. It was a nice, seemless install and was our main wiki for a while. However, I eventually moved away from that because the requirements of using MediaWiki code to format the page was sometimes more hassle than it was worth. I understood the value of learning this (since it’s what Wikipedia used), but I also thought that MediaWiki (and Wikipedia) should move to a WYSIWYG format.

WHAT COULD BE IMPROVED

While this setup was great for the most part, the limitations of the wiki and the blog were my only complaints about using Joomla.

Wiki: I continued to use the MediaWiki installation to create individual pages on the site that students can edit (for example, the “Help Using This Site” page). For the class wiki, though, I switched to WikiSpaces because they were so much easier to use. Unfortunately, this required another login for students, but the ease of WikiSpaces seemed worth it for me.

The Blog: The site blog allowed anyone to comment (with links to their profile). However, as I mentioned earlier, only “authors” and above could post, and posts needed to be approved by admins before they would appear. This is good if your concern is for a walled garden with screened content, but not so great if you want to run Joomla as a multi-user blog platform. Instead, my students also had accounts on the “eStudio,” an Elgg site for their personal blogs and filesharing (over which they have genuine control). To make the connection between the main site and their personal blogs, students listed their Elggspaces URL on their main profiles for easy linking, and included their Elggspaces feed on an RSS page in their MyBeyond tab. Again, though, this was another account and login for students.

Other than these two limitations, Joomla was pretty great. To make it perfect, we would have needed an integrated wiki as easy to use as WikiSpaces, with individual blogs fully integrated that were completely customizable by users and generated independent feeds (with podcast/videocast capabilities) like Elgg.

If you do give Joomla a try and discover some other ways to use it, I hope you’ll leave comments here. Happy webbing!