How to create an OER portal for your school

Open Education Resource Portal for New Zealand Schools

A national project for reusable and portable content

Home  |  Planning  |  Roles  |  Training  |  Resources  |  Digital Horizon  |  NZ OERs  |  FAQ's

Overview

Every school in New Zealand has the freedom to set up their own school OER portal page in WikiEducator. The intention is to highlight your schools' activities and projects on the OER front (rather than replicating your school website). This is a great way to facilitate and promote networking and OER collaboration among New Zealand schools because your portal will be listed from the OERNZ homepage.

This is a DIY resource for you to create your own school portal -- be bold and give it a try! WikiEducators who have attained the skills corresponding with a WikiApprentice (Level 2) on our WikiMaster typology have the skills needed to create a school portal page. If you get stuck, remember our motto: Just try it -- our community will support you!. If you make a mistake, not to worry. It's a wiki -- we can fix anything. Remember to post any questions or requests for support on our OERNZ discussion list. We're here to help.

This resource provides:

• links to examples of OER portal pages to familiarise yourself with the layout and to help generate ideas for your own school OER portal.
• instructions to get your portal page started with preloaded template pages to make the task easier.
• links to additional support materials and tutorials if required.

• Download a print version of these instructions: DIY Instructions for OERNZ School portal
  

Anatomy of an OERNZ School portal page

Figure 1': Screenshot of the OER portal of Albany Senior High School showing the navigation template and two-column layout (see Step 2 below).

A typical OER portal page is divided into two main areas (see Figure 1):

1. The navigation template at the top of the page which may contain links to the following pages and subpages:
   • The OERNZ landing page
   • The home page for your school portal
   • A subpage providing details about your school
   • A subpage where you can list your schools' OER projects
   • A subpage where you can list the names and contact particulars your school's OER team
2. The portal page layout which comprises:
   • A text box at the top of your page where you can display your welcome message or state your schools vision for open education. (Text box with the orange bar spanning across the 2-column layout in Figure 1.)
   • A two-column layout with boxes on the left and right side of the screen
   • Featured project (Left box 1), where you can profile featured OER projects at your school
   • Featured teacher (Left box 2), where you can recognise the OER achievements of teachers at your school
   • News and events (Right box 1), where you can announce OER events and news, for example local OER meetings, training opportunities and other news worthy items.
   • Discussion list feed (Right box 2), where you can aggregate the rss feed of your schools OER list or the national OERNZ discussion list.

Remember this is a wiki -- so you have total freedom to generate your own unique landing page with different boxes etc. This generic layout is provided as a starting point to explore and unleash your creativity!

Steps for creating your OER school portal on WikiEducator

Step 1: Preview a few examples

• Example school template - Note the navigation template at the top of the page and two column layout displaying the main boxes on the page.
• Warrington school
• Albany Senior High School

Step 2: Create the layout of the landing page for your school's OER portal

• The portal page uses a customised template which will automatically create the two-column layout for your school portal page and insert the navigation template onto the landing page.
• The input box provided below will insert the wiki template syntax used for a portal page and save this under the name of your school in WikiEducator.

Activity

Create a portal page for your school in WikiEducator Decide on the name for your portal page in WikiEducator. We suggest that you use the name of your school using upper and lower case letters as follows: Dunedin High School or St Mary's Elementary School. Enter the name of your school in the text field below adhering to the capitalisation guidelines suggested above. Click on the "Create my school OER portal page" button below and a new window will open. You don't need to make any edits in the new window -- just click on the "Save page" button to create your new portal page.

Step 3: Link the school portal page your created from the OERNZ portal page

This step involves creating an internal link to your school portal page you created in Step 2 above, from the main OERNZ landing page.

1. Go to list of New Zealand School Portals
2. Add a link to your school page using the standard syntax for an internal link:

[[Your_School_Name_Goes_Here|Your School Name]]

for example:

[[Warrington_School|Warrington School]]

• Remember to save your edit which should appear as a blue link to your school portal page. Should a red link appear after saving the page, this would suggest a typo in the syntax above. Check the capitalisation and exact name of the page you created in Step 2 above.

Step 4: Entering the text in the boxes on your portal page

Figure 2. Screenshot of a new portal page before any text has been entered "in" the text boxes displayed on the portal page. Click on the red page links or the edit link to start adding text to the text boxes.

After creating the portal page for your school the page should look similar to Figure 2, displaying a number of boxes with red page links.

The template we use for generating the layout of the portal page automatically creates a sub-page for each corresponding text box displayed on the portal page. The portal page is a little different from normal wiki pages because the text for each box is "fed" or "pushed" into the relevant text box from its corresponding sub-page (rather than being edited directly on the portal landing page itself). While this may sound confusing -- all you need to do is to click on the relevant "edit" link of the text box you want to edit, and a new window will open taking you to the correct page for editing.

Authoring the content for each text box on your portal page is easy.

1. Click on the corresponding edit tab or red link, and start entering your text.
2. Remember to save your edits.
3. To return back to the portal page, click on the breadcrumb link (the blue link displayed under the title of the page).
4. Repeat this process for authoring and saving text for each of the text boxes.
5. Remember that you can use standard wiki text for formatting, links and images on these portal pages.
6. You can create your own dedicated school discussion list and RSS feed for the Discussion list box. Alternatively, you may want to aggregate the feed of the OERNZ discussion list on you School portal page. To do this, click on the red link or edit tab of the Discussion list box. Copy and paste the following syntax, and remember to save your page:

[http://groups.google.com/group/oernz Join our OERNZ mailing list]

<rss>http://groups.google.com/forum/feed/oernz/msgs/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml|short|max=5</rss>

Step 5: Creating the subpages linked from the navigation template

The navigation template creates standard links for the following subpages:

• OERNZ: This inserts a link back to the OERNZ portal in WikiEducator.
• About: This is where you enter general information about your school. You may want to consider subheadings for: Location, Background, Web Resources and Contact Details. See for example Papanui High School.
• OER Projects: This is where you can list all your schools' OER projects.
• OER Contacts: Here you should list the teachers and school staff who are active participants in your OER initiative. The purpose of this page is to help teachers from other schools to connect and find opportunities for collaboration. Consider identifying the different roles and subject areas of your team.

Steps

1. Click on the red links displayed in your navigation template on the home page for your school portal. A new window will open.
2. Enter the relevant information for this subpage, alternatively just type: Content coming soon .... and save the page.
3. To return back to the home page of your portal, click on the breadcrumb link (the blue link displayed under the title of the page).

Step 6: Inserting the navigation template on each of the sub-pages linked from your navigation

The sub-pages contained in the navigation template displayed on your home page, will not have a navigation template. You need to insert the syntax to display the navigation.

• Go to the home page of your school OER portal.
• Copy the following syntax:

{{OERNZ_school_portal_nav}}

• Click on the "About" link displayed in the navigation template and paste the syntax above at the top of the page.
• Remember to save your page.
• Repeat this process for the "OER Projects" and "OER Contacts" by inserting {{OERNZ_school_portal_nav}} onto each of these pages.

Step 7: Customising your navigation template by inserting your school logo

It is possible to customise your navigation template by adding your school logo. You will need to be familiar with the syntax used for inserting images and manipulating the size.

• Go to the homepage of your school's OER portal
• Delete the following syntax on your home page:

{{OERNZ_school_portal_nav}}

• Make sure that you have a copy of your school logo in jpg, png or gif format ready to upload in WikiEducator.
• Now insert the following syntax:

{{OERNZ_school_portal_nav|Logo= [[image:My_school_logo.jpg|100px]]}}

for example:

{{OERNZ_school_portal_nav|Logo= [[image:Warrington_school_logo.png|100px]]}}

• You may need to adjust the size of the display of the image. For a larger display try replacing with 120px in the syntax above.
• Note the right alignment of the image is done automatically by the template.
• To ensure that your logo appears on each sub-page listed on the navigation template you will need to repeat this process on each sub-page, ie delete {{OERNZ_school_portal_nav}} and replace with {{OERNZ_school_portal_nav|Logo= [[image:My_school_logo.jpg|100px]]}}