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

Summary


We began this chapter by completing our investigation of methods of incorporating mathematical notation in our Moodle courses. These methods often rely on third-party services to render the notation. That's fine until those services fail; then your course, without its notation, may become unusable.

A quick search of the Internet finds a wealth of resources for mathematics teaching. We investigated various ways of incorporating these resources in our Moodle courses.

I have also included a discussion of a 3D interactive molecule viewer in this chapter. Why? Because I often get asked by science teachers how they can include mathematical notation in their Moodle courses, and I wanted to recognize that it's likely that you might not be a mathematics teacher. Also, the tool I describe (Jmol) requires us to install a special Moodle filter (building on experience gained in Chapter 7, where we investigated the jsMath filter).

Remember, if you need more advice and guidance on teaching mathematics...