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 - searching for 3D models to combine inside a 2D box


The creation and rendering of 3D models for a discovering sentences exercise is very complex and involves professional skills. We are going to simplify this process by using existing free 3D models rendered in 2D bitmap images.

  1. 1. Start Inkscape and minimize it. You will use it later.

  2. 2. Open your default web browser and go to http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse. This web page allows us to search for 3D models in Google 3D warehouse.

  3. 3. Enter school bag in the textbox, select Models in the combo box and click on the Search button. Many models matching the search criteria will appear as shown in the next screenshot:

  1. 4. Click on the desired model's thumbnail. The default view for the rendered 3D model will appear.

  2. 5. Click on the 3D View button located on the upper right-hand side corner of the 3D model.

  3. 6. Position the mouse pointer on the center of the 3D model. Press the mouse button and drag it horizontally to rotate the model until you get the desired view.

  4. 7. Position the mouse pointer on the center of the 3D model again. Right-click on it and select Save picture as in the context menu that appears, as shown in the next screenshot:

  1. 8. Since you want to change the picture size without losing quality using Inkscape, select Bitmap (*.bmp) in the Save as type combo box and save the file as schoolbag.bmp in the previously created folder, C:\School.

  2. 9. Now, activate Inkscape—remember that it was running minimized. You can use Alt + Tab or Windows + Tab.

  3. 10. Select File | Import from the main menu, select the previously saved file (C:\School\schoolbag.bmp), and click on the Open button. The rendered 3D model will appear in Inkscape's drawing area.

  4. 11. Now, go back to the web browser without closing Inkscape and repeat the aforementioned steps (2 to 10) for each 3D model to combine inside a box—Inkscape's drawing area. In this case, repeat those steps searching for the following things and saving the image files with the names shown in the following table:

Search for

Picture file name

book

book.bmp

calculator

calculator.bmp

  1. 12. The three rendered 3D models will now appear in Inkscape's drawing area, as shown in the next screenshot:

  1. 13. Select File | Save from Inkscape's main menu. Save the file as image010201.svg in the previously created folder, C:\School.

What just happened?

We combined three rendered 3D models in Inkscape's drawing areas. We searched for 3D models in Google 3D warehouse and we imported the bitmap files obtained from the desired views into Inkscape's drawing area.

We now have a picture with these three rendered 3D models, representing real-life shapes:

  • A school bag

  • A book

  • A calculator