Product description

The Classroom Solution adds functionality specific for teacher-student-interactions to the 21Publish Weblog Server. There are different configurations available, either for teacher blogs where students can only read or comment on entries, or individual student blogs. The Classroom Extension is suitable for all grades. Teachers can decide whether their students and their blogs are visible to the Internet, or whether access is restricted to logged-in students only. Such settings can be controlled on a school-wide level, or left to each individual teacher. Thus, a single school-wide installation can still be used among all grades. Features offered by the extension are:

• Advanced safety features
• Feedback-based review mechanism
• Teacher feedback in separate channel
• School-wide content aggregator
• Teacher blogs and/or individual student blogs
• Wording specific to students and teachers
• Fully customizable
• External connectors available
• Inhouse hosting available

All features can be customized according to customer requirements. School-wide installations can be customized to aggregate content from different accounts. All functionality offered by the 21Publish Weblog Server core component is available and can either be enabled or disabled.

Please note that our service 21Classes is powered by our Classroom Solution.

Contact us for a quote »

Use cases

The Classroom Solution can be integrated into schools, universities or other educational institutions with a teacher-and-student relationship. Student publishing can be configured per classroom account, thus it can also be used to offer students their own personal blog within your institution. See our selected list of sample use-cases:

• Classroom BlogPortals: integrate blogs into your classroom. Post assignments for your students and have them submit stories. All blogs are interconnected and accessible through a common homepage
• Teacher blogs: simply offer blogs for teachers where students are allowed to leave comments or even read specific entries. Students can be separated into reader groups to control access per story.
• Student blogs: allow your students to set up personal blogs to post about their daily live within your institutional blogging and privacy guidelines

Use cases are not limited to the examples above, especially since customization options and extension modules are available.

Technical requirements

The 21Publish Classroom Solution generally runs on any platform with Java 6 and with access to a MySQL database. For any installation, recommended sytem configurations are

• Java 6+
• MySQL 5.0+
• Linux-based OS (e.g. Debian Squeeze)
• 1 GB RAM
• 500 MB diskspace
• Apache reverse-proxy

We recommend to use an Apache 2.2+ as reverse-proxy for performance and configuration reasons. While our server includes a built-in webserver capable of delivering all media types, a reverse proxy such as Apache or Nginx can speed up delivery of static files significantly. Furthermore, SSL options and various performance tweaks known to Apache can be applied. For the dynamic content, our internal webserver can be used, or a Jetty 7+-based engine instead.