Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Teaching Special Education Children (5-10): Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Teaching Special Education Children (5-10): Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Moodle is a free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. But what does it have to offer to the children with special educational needs who want a fun, inspiring, interactive, and informative learning experience? Moodle 1.9 empowers educators achieve all these set of rich experiences with many related activities - this book shows you how! This book offers solutions to developing interactive courses and therapies for children with special education needs who are between the age group of 5 to 10 years. It teaches to combine Moodle 1.9 with the opportunities offered by Web 2.0, free and commercial software, and general purpose hardware devices. This book will guide the reader step-by-step in using many different tools to create exciting experiences to offer great motivation to children with special educational needs, considering the opportunities for online education. This book will help the reader to build interactive and rich online content oriented to children with special educational needs using different techniques and open source tools. It teaches you to create exercises as if you were playing with children at the school, the zoo, the beach, the supermarket, a birthday party, an aquarium, a farm, at the shopping, a circus or at home. You will be able to work with drawings, music, sounds, videos, photographs and text, and you will combine all these pieces into nice experiences for children who need to find extra motivation to improve their learning skills. Besides, it will teach you to take advantage of general purpose, non-expensive hardware like gamepads, joysticks, digital pens also known as pen-sketches, multi-touch screens, netbooks and touchpads. The usage of some of these hardware devices combined with visually rich activities usually offer children an extra motivation to focus on solving the exercises.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 for Teaching Special Education Children (5-10 Year Olds)
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface

Time for action - installing tools to manipulate 2D scalable clipart


We must first download and install some additional tools that will help us in searching, editing, combining, and converting 2D scalable clipart to the most appropriate file formats to use in Moodle and its related applications:

Note

The necessary tools will depend on the original 2D scalable clipart. However, we will be using some tools that will work fine with our examples.

  1. 1. Download the following files:

Application's name

Download link

File name

Description

Inkscape

http://inkscape.org/download/?lang=en

Inkscape-0.47win32.exe

This is a very complete free, open source, vector drawing program. This tool will enable us to import many vector assets in different popular file formats and export them to a format recognized by Moodle and Hot Potatoes.

Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007

http://www.microsoft.com/office/trial/default.aspx

X12-30107.exe

This is a commercial tool, but the trial offers a free fully functional version for 60 days. Microsoft Word 2007 will enable us to search vector assets in Office Online Clip Art & Media.

  1. 2. Run the installers and follow the steps to complete the installation wizards.

  2. 3. Once Inkscape's installation is completed, you will be able to load and edit many vector assets in different file formats, as shown in the following screenshot:

  3. 4. Once Office 2007 installation is completed, you will be able to use the powerful clipart search capabilities offered by Word 2007, as shown in the next screenshot:

What just happened?

We installed Inkscape and Microsoft Office 2007. We now have the necessary tools to combine, edit, and convert scalable 2D clipart found in Office Online Clip Art & Media and export it to a format recognized by Moodle and Hot Potatoes.