Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques

Overview of this book

Moodle is the world's most popular, free open-source Learning Management System (LMS). It is vast and has lots to offer. More and more colleges, universities, and training providers are using Moodle, which has helped revolutionize e-learning with its flexible, reusable platform and components. It works best when you feel confident that the tools you have at hand will allow you to create exactly what you need.This book brings together step-by-step, easy-to-follow instructions and learning theory to give you new tools and new power with Moodle. It will show you how to connect with your online students, and how and where they develop an enthusiastic, open, and trusting relationship with their fellow students and with you, their instructor. With this book, you'll learn to get the best from Moodle.This book helps you develop good, solid, dynamic courses that will last by making sure that your instructional design is robust, and that they are built around satisfying learning objectives and course outcomes. With this book, you'll have excellent support and step-by-step guidance for putting together courses that incorporate your choice of the many features that Moodle offers. You will also find the best way to create effective assessments, and how to create them for now and in the future. The book will also introduce you to many modules, which you can use to make your course unique and create an environment where your students will get maximum benefit. In addition, you will learn how you can save time and reuse your best ideas by taking advantage of Moodle's unique features.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Helping students learn: Schema building


One of the most exciting uses of the glossary is to help learners develop categories of knowledge, make connections to their experience, and to elaborate the concepts.

For this purpose, glossaries help students create what educational psychologists refer to as a schema (plural is schemata). A schema is a category that represents general knowledge. Think of it as a file folder where you can organize your knowledge. A successful educational project allows learners to create a number of file folders, or schemata. At the end of the day, the resultant structure is an interconnected web of nodes of knowledge, which encourages associations and additional ways of thinking.

So, when creating a glossary, you will be creating a database of individual entries, and will be grouping them by creating labels which you will attach to the schemata.

Once you have developed the structure of your glossaries/schemata, you can then develop activities that foster interactive...