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 - organizing composite pictures and texts


We now have to add the composite pictures with different sizes to our exercise in JMatch:

  1. 1. Stay in the JMatch exercise, matching0101.

  2. 2. Click on the first Left (ordered) items textbox.

  3. 3. Select Insert | Picture| Picture from local file from JMatch's main menu. Choose the previously exported bitmap image image010101.png in C:\School and click on the Open button. A dialog box will appear displaying the image preview and some options, as shown in the next screenshot:

  1. 4. Click on OK. JMatch will show the following HTML code in the textbox:

    <img src="image010101.png" alt="image010101.png"
    title="image010101" width="129" height="182"></img>
    
  2. 5. Edit the HTML code in the textbox, adding the following header (prefix). We want to specify a background color for the picture.

    <h2 style="background:blue">
    
  3. 6. Add the following footer (suffix):

    </h2>
    
  4. 7. The HTML code shown in the textbox should be as follows:

    <h2 style="background:blue">
    <img src="image010101.png" alt="image010101.png"
    title="image010101" width="129" height="182"></img></h2>
    
  5. 8. Click on the corresponding Left (ordered) items textbox and repeat the aforementioned steps (2 to 8) using the information shown in the next table. You have to replace the color name entered after the background: tag, with the color specified for each row.

Row number

Picture file name

Background color name

2

image010102.png

blue

3

image010103.png

green

4

image010104.png

green

  1. 9. The Left (ordered) items textboxes must show the HTML code for each picture as shown in the following screenshot:

  1. 10. Save the changes and select File | Create Web Page | Drag/Drop Format. Replace the existing web page and click on View the exercise in my browser.

  2. 11. The default web browser will appear showing the matching exercise with a drag/drop format. You will be able to see the four pictures and the jumbled sentences. Two of the pictures show a blue background (the pictures with big things) and the other two a green one (the pictures with small things), as shown in the next screenshot:

  3. 12. Perform the last two steps repeatedly. The jumbled sentences will change their order each time the matching exercise appears on the web browser.

What just happened?

We added the composite pictures with different sizes to our matching composite pictures exercise. We inserted the corresponding picture in the left-hand side for each sentence on the right-hand side.

When we run the exercise loading the web page created by JMatch, it jumbles the sentences on the right-hand side of the screen.

Using HTML tags to define background colors

We didn't want to use the default background colors for the pictures. We added HTML code to specify different background colors for the aforementioned composite pictures. As previously explained when defining colors for the text in the sentences, JMatch doesn't offer a simple way to select background colors for the pictures. Therefore, we had to use HTML tags again. We used the following header to specify a Heading 2 style with a blue background color:

<h2 style="background:blue">

We left the HTML code added by JMatch to insert the picture without changes and finally we used the following footer:

</h2>

We used the same tags for the other pictures. We just replaced the backgroundcolor:blue code with backgroundcolor:green in the pictures with a green background color.

Note

Everything we learned about defining customized color codes for the text foreground color (color property) also applies to the background color property.