Secondary school teacher needs hand holding to create a classroom site.

I posted this request at DrupalEd, but decided this might be a more appropriate forum.

I am interesting in creating a drupal based site for daily use in my secondary social studies classroom. Drupal is very robust and seems to offer endless possibilities for the classroom. I have been working on a Drupal based site for the past 10 days. I have been experimenting with modules, user permissions, navigation, themes, and general setup. I currently have a working site with lots of potential. But, unsurprisingly, I am running into pretty standard organizational and conceptual problems concerning Drupal. I have created many project oriented web sites for my classes in the past, but these were in dreamweaver and were html rather than cms based sites. I think I know how I want my site to be organized, and how I want to use the different modules - and I know Druapl is up to the task - but I get lost when it comes to the actual set up of the site.

I have searched the discussion forums and read the handbook and documentation and these have been helpful in many ways. I have approached new technology in the past and am familiar with my own learning curve, but unfortunately I don't have the time to let my brain run its course - school starts September 1st. I would like to have at least a basic site up before the beginning of the school year.

I have many small simple questions that don't seem important enough for the forums - and, at this point, I really need to focus on instructional goals and content and how my site can enhance those and function as a tool for learning - and leave the actual site set up to someone more savvy than me and who can then bring me up to speed. In the simpliest terms - I need someone very familar with Drupal who can listen to what I want, make my site do that and then educate me on how they did it.

At first, all I need is a pretty basic site - a teacher blog, syllabus, and assignment log - but I would like the site to expand to allow more students to interact with the sight and their own learning in creative ways. The site would consist of a general front page for posting announcements for all of my classes. Then a section for my 2 global studies classes and a section for my 3 government classes. Each of these sections would contain a daily blog written by me that recounts our class room activities, a project page - for larger multiday projects - an assignments/homework page, a news aggregator page - an rss feeder to pull in either political or global news, a space for individual student or group blogs - and perhaps some other pages. I have many of the necessary modules installed and working, but the sight lacks navigation and structure - in other words I have the notes, but not the tune.

If anyone is interested, or could point me in the right direction, it would be much appreciated. And I realize knowledge and time are valuable, and although I would like to pay more, I would be willing to pay some kind of fee.

Thanks

http://www.mrlazarski.com/drupal