Drupal in Education:

There is a need for Schools and Colleges to have a Dynamic website. This can be very easily achieved using some basic modules in Drupal

A broad list of features any educational institute would require and their associated modules / Drupal configuration.

I) Roles: ( Define using Drupal’s core access control functionality)
1. Admin
2. Teacher
3. Student
4. Visitor

II) Various Content and Content Categories - use Taxonomy to define the categories and CCK for different types of content
1. Announcements – Just another content type
2. Marketing content: - Static content
About us
Contact us
Feedback, etc.

III) Galleries – I love brilliant gallery and the effect that goes with it.

IV) Video – use video CCK with FFMpeg conversion tool, size of videos is always a problem and costs bandwidth as well. So using FFmpeg, we can configure the videos to get optimized as flash files.

V) Features for Registered users (parents/teachers/students)

1. Student id creation (bulk upload) og,
2. Class wise Home work (upload) – CCK and og
3. Class wise Events (online event registration) og - event module
4. Contact teachers – contact us page
5. Personalized Dashboards – Use views

References:

CCK:
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/cck
http://drupal.org/project/cck
Views:
http://drupal.org/node/109604
http://drupal.org/project/views
Taxonomy:
http://drupal.org/node/299

Video and FFMpeg modules:
http://drupal.org/project/flashvideo
http://drupal.org/project/video_cck
http://drupal.org/project/emfield
Gallery:
http://drupal.org/project/brilliant_gallery
http://drupal.org/project/gallery
Organic Groups:
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/og
http://drupal.org/project/og
Other useful modules:
http://drupal.org/project/pathauto
http://drupal.org/project/front

Some interesting articles and podcasts:

1. Using Drupal in Education, Training, and (Some) Next Steps
At: http://www.funnymonkey.com/book-training-next-steps
You can also download DrupalEd, a pre configured Drupal installation for Educational institutions.

2. Jeff Robbins talks to Bill Fitzgerald of FunnyMonkey about how Drupal is being used in universities, high schools, and other educational institutions at
http://www.lullabot.com/audiocast/podcast-66-bill-fitzgerald-education

Groups to follow:
http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-education