Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Multimedia

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Multimedia

Overview of this book

In today's world, multimedia can provide a more engaging experience for learners. You can embed your own audio, link to pages off-site, or pull a YouTube video into your course. You can use feature-rich quizzes that allow you to assess your students, or provide them with tools and feedback to test their own knowledge. All these require standard procedures and cutting-edge tools. Selecting tools to make multimedia integration in Moodle faster, simpler, and more precise is not child's play. This book provides you with everything you need to include sound, video, animation, and more in your Moodle courses. You'll develop Moodle courses that you are proud of, and that your students enjoy. This book covers integration of multimedia into Moodle, covering major multimedia elements such as images, audio, and video. It will take you through these elements in detail where you will learn how to create, edit, and integrate these elements into Moodle. The book is written around the design of an online course called "Music for Everyday Life" using Moodle, where teachers and students create, share, and discuss multimedia elements. You will also learn how to use Web 2.0 tools to create images, audio, and video and then we will take a look at the web applications that allow easy creation, collaboration, and sharing of multimedia elements. Finally, you will learn how to interact with students in real-time using a particular online phone service and a desktop sharing application.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Multimedia
Credits
About the author
About the reviewers
Preface

Finding free pictures online


Reinventing the wheel, especially for teachers, is a great path to burn-out. Creating pictures for our courses (photos, drawings, and icons), if we are working from scratch, is extremely time-consuming, adding to the course design effort, interaction with students, or worse, assessment. Fortunately, we are not working alone anymore, as there are many places on the Web where, with the help of millions, we can get ready-made pictures, for free (well, sometimes searching for a nice picture can take a while, but it can be worth the effort!). But first, let's take a look at the basic image formats, before we go on to see the places where we can find free online pictures.

The basics of image formats

There are some things that we should know about image formats, particularly how to choose the best formats for our Moodle courses. There are many formats around, but the good news is that we will just need to use four of these in our daily life:

  • GIF: It's an old format...