I’ve been a huge fan of phpBB ever since I was introduced to the system nearly 7 years ago when a best friend of mine was developing an online interest community. phpBB3.0 was officially released the other day after months of community development.

Click HERE to read the press release

The software is free under the GNU General Public License. Prior to this release, phpBB3 was available for use under the release candidates and I’ve been using it for testing and two communities are currently run: Cadre 13, and CorreiaTeachers.com.

I still have two communities I have developed running under phpBB2 including the new online academic community of CorreiaSeminar.com and the first academic community I developed on my old static site.

The greatest component that comes with phpBB is its’ human component! A dedicated community develops endless modifications and features to meet the growing demand of today’s web applications. In education and in other industries, phpBB internet forums will have a last impact in online communities.

With the official stable release, other groups will adapt phpBB’s use in every way. After finally understanding how 2.0 works, I stand back at square one (almost) to see how I can utilize Gold in my web communities.

CorreiaTeachers.com was created after discussions with many teachers over the 2006-2007 school year. I hope the site will be a practical solution to increasing school communication, reduce meetings, and facilitate stronger collaboration while bringing the teaching staff to the 21st century of communication technology.

CorreiaTeachers.com was registered on June 7, 2007 and pointed to my server (though we could potentially move the database at anytime). The software, phpBB3 RC1, was installed on June 9th. phpBB is open source topic forum software that is completely customizable to meet the needs as our community grows.

RC7 (release candidate) is phpBB3’s latest version and though I have upgraded a few times since June, I’ve been waiting for the official stable release to come out.

The greatest challenge in setting up an Online Teacher Community is not technical. In fact, that’s the easiest part. The greatest challenge lies in encouraging teachers to utilize it. Though prior to its development, my discussions with teacher’s showed great enthusiasm for the potential. Even at its release, after a few days of development, teachers and administrators alike were excited about the potential.

For those of you who are teachers or work at a school, you know that it takes more than throwing the world online to encourage teachers and administrators to give the new tool a whirl.

After the first professional development giving the teachers a tutorial of phpBB3, I repeatedly heard, “It’s just one more thing I have to check.” As our administrators and teacher leaders increasingly use the site for communication, I still hear it.

It is not that teachers are resistant to change, they deal with change every minute throughout the school year, I think teachers know technology has a learning curve and they know it takes time. Time is short for teachers whose plate is always overflowing. Unfortunately, the daily stress and overwhelming responsibility that comes with teaching often shades the light of opportunity.

Leadership is necessary in this environment and my administration has recently taken an active role. Actually, I’m proud of them! I know some school administrations are reluctant to require their staff uses email.

More to come on the community!

I have talked to several people who have been interested in how I have been using forums in the classroom.  Teachers and such often ask, “How can I get that!?”  As soon as I tell them to get their own server, learn some web basics, and install the thing, they quickly think it must be a technical nightmare.

Actually, with some basic net know-how, there is plenty of support and expertise for phpBB.  Actually, I’ve never experienced a more positive and helpful community.

phpBB’s Support Community runs on phpBB, of course, and is a great way to see how the structure of a topic forum community works.  Much of the discussion right now is about the new version bugs and development.  There are discussions going on between web developers, code junkies, MOD writers,  administrators, and users about anything and everything related to phpBB.  phpBB is in fact a product of the community.

I think the Support Community is an interesting place to see and watch.  It has changed quite a bit over the years with varying degrees of traffic depending on needs and development stages.  Actually, it would be a good case study to see how ideas develop and are implemented in an open source environment.  Dissertation anyone?

Click HERE to visit the phpBB Support Community

My former website has recently joined the discarded static html virtual dump. Though my trash can be someone else’s treasure, I kicked my old teaching resource to the curb. Having students access the web for content is a thing of the past. It simply is not “cool” anymore. Want to know what’s cool? Ask a group of teenagers. Never ask just one teenager or a number of teenagers individually - you’ll only hear what they think you want to hear. Ask a group of teenagers what they like to do on the internet. Surrounded by peers, they’ll tell you what is in and what is cool on the internet.

Ignoring specifics, my students tell me they engage in four different activities: gaming, downloading media, messaging, and social networking. Static html pages just can’t compete with this!

After experiences with participating in online interest communities over the past many years, I wanted to give it a try in my classroom. 2 years ago, MrG-Online.com got a side-kick: phpBB. Introducing online forums to students is one of the coolest things that can happen to a classroom. phpBB is a world-class internet forum component that is open source and written in php. It was an easy transition for the MySpace users and a surprisingly fun way to interact as a class. Internet forums have been out for a very long time and are very popular with online interest groups. For two years, my static site, though highly utilized for class news, assignments, and document downloads, was becoming an entry point to our developing online academic community in the forums.

Rare things happened in the forums. Students wrote more, gathered after hours to discuss homework, and some students logged in after they left our middle school for high school to help other students and just to say hi!

Moving to a website, I knew a completely interactive site would have potential to do more of the other things teenagers like to do like social networking and sharing media (I squeeze gaming in there but for now, I link them to outside science and math games). phpBB would be the heart of our new community. It is the classroom and the lunch court.

…more to follow

After installing Gallery2, I really wanted to find a way to mesh them together. I wanted visitors to be able to view random photos and interact with the gallery within WordPress. This WP Plugin, WPG2, was the answer! It was a little tricky to get working. They have a decent support page for the plugin at http://wpg2.galleryembedded.com

To have images from your Gallery2 show up in a sidebar, you need to add the code in there! If you’re a bit lazy, Alywin took several popular WP themes and optimized them for WPG2. You can find the optimized theme’s at: http://dev.cal-family.org/category/wpg2-themes/

Another issue I was having was G2’s theme not integrating with WordPress. The default G2 theme’s width extends beyond the WP template. I took the suggestion from the support page to use their G2 theme for WordPress. With some minor adjustments, everything seems to be working nicely.

There are many features I would like to have on this site and it will be just a matter of time to have them all working together. I just installed an image gallery package on my server called Gallery

Soon, there will be a link along with integration into WordPress. For now, the image gallery can be found here: http://www.seangardinier.com/gallery2/main.php

After moving my teaching site (MrG-Online.com) to its own server where I could host unlimited domains and databases, I decided that I should have my own domain with a personal blog for archiving my professional development. After testing out and researching several Content Management Systems using OpenSourceCMS.com, I decided to go with Wordpress for its simplicity, large support community, and adaptability.

At the same time, I registered and initiated CorreiaSeminar.com, a new teaching site that will be the portal for 7th and 8th grade gifted students at my school. CorreiaTeachers.com was also initiated to provide the staff at my school an online forum for communication and collaboration. Lastly, I registered MichelleGardinier.com for my wife. I installed WordPress for her as well.

A teacher colleague of mine was also interested in having his own domain. I helped him register his own site, JackVallerga.com, and decided to host and coach him along the way. He also has WordPress installed. Having some commonality amongst 4 of the 6 sites will make it easier for me learn and develop WordPress’ potential.

With all the web development excitement, another colleague has also made the transition to Wordpress. MrOzeni.com has left behind the days of static pages created in DreamWeaver for the relational database structure.