Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Math

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Math

Overview of this book

Moodle is a popular e-learning platform that is making inroads into all areas of the curriculum. Using moodle helps you to develop exciting, interactive, and engaging online math courses. But teaching math requires use of graphs, equations, special notation, and other features that are not built into Moodle. Using Moodle to teach Mathematics presents its own challenges. The book will show you how to set-up a Moodle course to support the teaching of mathematics. It will also help you to carefully explore the Moodle plugins that allow the handling of equations and enable other frequently used mathematical activities. Taking a practical approach, this book will introduce you to the concepts of converting mathematics teaching over to Moodle. It provides you with everything you need to include mathematical notation, graphs, images, video, audio, and more in your Moodle courses. By following the practical examples in this book, you can create feature-rich quizzes that are automatically marked, use tools to monitor student progress, employ modules and plugins allowing students to explore mathematical concepts. You'll also learn the integration of presentations, interactive math elements, SCORM, and Flash objects into Moodle. It will take you through these elements in detail and help you learn how to create, edit, and integrate them into Moodle. Soon you will develop your own exciting, interactive, and engaging online math courses with ease.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Math
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
Preface

DragMath


DragMath is a drag-and-drop equation editor originally developed by Alex Billingsley, under the tutelage of Chris Sangwin, at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

You can see that it looks very similar to the equation editors we first introduced in Chapter 2. However, as you can see, DragMath fully integrates into Moodle. It was originally part of a computer algebra system called STACK, which we introduced in Chapter 6. More details on DragMath can be found in the Moodle docs (http://docs.moodle.org/en/DragMath_equation_editor).

Let's start by installing DragMath. You'll need Moodle administrator privileges, and you'll need access to the server Moodle is running on. If you don't have either, then hand this book over to your Moodle administrator now.

Installing DragMath

I'm going to install DragMath on the latest version of Moodle (at the time of writing, this is 1.9.4). If you are using an older version of Moodle, then the installation process will be slightly different; it's all...