Creating a website for my Physics class. Would love your critiques.

I think it’s been over 3 years since I created a thread in these forums… Hadn’t really realized how long I’d been away until the other day when I tried to login.

Anywho…

I’m going to try out a blend of four or five educational strategies related to technology. As of now I plan on actually incorporating this blend starting with the 2013-2014 school year. Since what I’m going to do hasn’t been done before I’m expecting it to take at least a year to put into place. Replicating it for other teachers though shouldn’t be nearly as time intensive.

One of the pieces which is going to be required for this is a user friendly, easy to update, expandable website. My original thought was to use our schools server but I would have been forced into ruby on rails as well as being unable to have ftp access.

After a semi-long look at the CMS’s out there nothing really fit right out of the box. So I decided to go with WP due to the plugin base and try and make it work. I think it’s going to do the trick.

To this point I haven’t started to make the site pretty. I’ve been focusing on what elements I want it to have. It needs to have the ability to have daily content separated into 16 different teacher areas (categories), static content for each of those 16 categories (pages), static content applicable to all categories (exclude pages plugin), forum system for student questions (bbpress). It also going to need the ability to further delineate user roles (members). As well as a host of other odds and ends.

So what I’d like a few of you to do, is to put yourself in the shoes of a science teacher and think – If you wanted to start using a classroom website on a daily basis what elements would you want it to have? After thinking about that please visit:

https://www.lionscience.com

and see if those elements are there. If they’re not let me know what they are.

Thank you.

edit: Forgot to add… you might want to look at the plugin list. I remember the days when having 20+ plugins installed on one install was a recipe for disaster. This package has come a long long way. Hat’s off to the whole WP team and plugin developers. (you can find the plugins I’m using under Jacks / Teacher Resources / WordPress Plugins Used