I'm thinking about making a website to host information for my high school English classes. Since I want more than static HTML, and since I know very little about any of the coding necessary for the kind of project I want to undertake, I'm looking at trying on some content management systems.

Basically, I want to be able to easily upload daily lesson plans for three separate classes, and I want to be able to attach Word/PDF/image files as necessary. I'll be posting tons of links to grammar tutorials, literary discussions, etc., and I'll probably end up creating and deleting many, many sections on the site. A calendar option would be fantastic. I'd like to be able to add "news" items to the front page as needed, obviously. Plus anything else that I may consider important later on as I try to create this thing.

Cosmetics aren't important, though I'd like it to look as professional as possible. That is, I don't have a specific design in mind.

And since I'm a public school teacher, price is a factor, and free is better. To further complicate matters, I'm stuck on a painfully slow dial-up connection, and the only site I've visited before getting frustrated has been Joombla. It looks promising, but I figured you people might have a better idea of where I ought to start. It's been a while since I've messed with this stuff.

Also: If you catch any typos or grammatical no-nos in my post, assume they're intentional so we can move beyond the irony of an English teacher messing up a thread and get to the heart of the matter.

6/7/2007 11:57:20 PM

when my wife was getting her teaching degree, I had grand visions of doing something similar for her future classes, making her a super hi-tech teacher with lesson plans and parent sign-in and stuff. But instead of teaching, she went straight into being a professional athlete..... so I never got to do it.

anyway, i was thinking there has to be CMS type systems available already that are tailored for classrooms and teachers. Have you asked any other teachers or the principal to see if the school or district supports anything like this already?

6/8/2007 12:00:42 AM

Yeah, I spoke to our tech people yesterday. The school doesn't even offer web space for teachers' sites, much less any sort of templates or systems in place.

6/8/2007 12:04:06 AM

there are a couple of open-source CMS packages for teachers/professors. Check out the usual spots (aka hotscripts.com for php) and see what you can dig up.

6/8/2007 12:34:45 AM