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

Alternative ways to create math notation


In this book, we have investigated the typical ways of including math notation in our Moodle courses. For example, in Chapter 7, we enabled the TeX filter and learned how to use DragMath to create the LaTeX code, which the TeX filter then converts into mathematical notation. We saw how the jsMath filter attempts to create math notation on the server but, if it fails to do so, it can attempt to do the same in the browser (in other words, the jsMath filter degrades gracefully).

There are still more ways to create mathematical notation using graphical user interfaces (GUIs), aside from DragMath. These alternative methods are very easy to use. Some of them rely on third-party websites to create the mathematical notation (web services). It isn't necessarily a problem until that web service is unavailable for some reason. Then, all of your nice mathematical notation will disappear!

Let's run through just a few of those tools now:

MathType

MathType is the equation...