Public School Forum Wesley Turner EKU, Dept. of Technology, CEN

2 OUTLINE Process of setting up X on XP machine Designing webpage using Adobe Photoshop/ImageReady Wordpress School Fusion and vBulletin

3 MOTIVATION Wanted students in the public school system who either misses school or forgets to write down the day’s HW assignments to have way to look that up. Also a way for parents to check on what their child is doing in class.

4 INTRODUCTION Background about issue Any technical research you performed related to the topic

5 PROBLEM STATEMENT What happens when a student misses a day of school? What does student do when he/she gets home from school and realizes they forgot to copy down tonight's homework?

6 PROPOSED SOLUTION My solution to a problem that occurs almost daily in today’s public schools’ is to design and implement a school’s webpage that will have the ability for teachers to post their class material online for their students to see or for parents to get a better idea of what their child may be learning. Also make it possible for schools administrators to post events/news. Would also like to make it possible for students to post completed assignments and discuss online with other students.

Software Used: Adobe Photoshop/ImageReady Xampp(Installing Apache, PHP, MySQL, phpmyadmin) Wordpress Installing Xampp: Xampp is an easy to install all-in-one suite 7

Installing Apache, PHP, MySQL, and phpmyadmin seperately and then getting them to communicate with each other correctly is a hard task, but with Xampp all is installed together on my Windows XP box. Once I downloaded Xampp to the desktop, I double-clicked the installer package and followed on screen instructions. The installer recommends installing in c:\Xampp, which I chose to accept, but you can choose to install anywhere. When Xampp options window appears (next slide), in most cases, it’s fine to leave all the window’s checkboxes just as you see. 8

9  After clicking install Apache Server, PHP, MySql, and phpmyadmin is setup automatically.  Once installed congratulating you and asks if you want to open the control panel.

Installed Wordpress Set up users Created Teacher’s pages which give a little introduction to the class and can contain information related to homework, upcoming tests or classroom news. Posted School News/Events 10

Created school’s main page (index.html). Photoshop has endless possibilities and because of this there are so many different ways to design a page. Once all the school’s content is put into the design I transfer to ImageReady and set up the links, assign a screen resolution, and save as a webpage. 11

12 RESULTS School’s Mainpage 2 Freeware Forum Wordpress Quicksilver 2 Examples of Forums that cost money. vBulletin School Fusion

13

14 CONCLUSIONS By teachers having the ability to post class material and announcements online they could use it as a great opportunity to improve student learning outside the classroom. Once a student leaves school their education is put on hold until the next school day but with an opportunity to get online and get homework or missed assignments then a students education can always continue.

CONCLUSIONS By completing this project I learned how to use apache, php, MySQL, and phpmyadmin in a Windows environment. Whereas before my experience only came using a linux platform. 15

16 FUTURE WORK In the future I would like to use a better forum instead of Wordpress. Because Wordpress is more of a blog than a forum it isn’t capable of doing the things I wanted. I believe a forum like vBulletin or school fusion is a great example of what this idea could become. Questions or Suggestions?