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 - adding the activity to a Moodle course


We now have to add the discovering sentences exercise to an existing Moodle course.

  1. 1. Log in to your Moodle server and make sure that the Hot Potatoes Quiz activity module isn't hidden.

  2. 2. Click on the desired course name (School) and then on Turn editing on.

  3. 3. Position the mouse pointer over the desired week under Weekly outline (a week later than the matching composite pictures exercise). Then, click on the Edit summary icon (a small hand with a pencil).

  4. 4. Enter Exercise 2 in Summary and click on the Save changes button.

  5. 5. Click on the Add an activity combo box for the selected week and choose Hot Potatoes Quiz.

  6. 6. A new web page will appear displaying the title Adding a new Hot Potatoes Quiz. Click on the Choose or upload a file… button and a pop-up window displaying information about files and folders will appear.

  7. 7. Click on chapter01 (the folder created in our previous exercise).

  8. 8. Click on the Upload a file button and then on Browse. Browse to the folder that holds the images and the files used in the exercise (C:\School) and select the file to upload, image010201.png. Then, click on Open and on the Upload this file button.

  9. 9. Repeat the aforementioned step for the file generated by JQuiz, quiz0102.html.

  10. 10. Next, position the mouse pointer over the quiz0102.htm name and move it horizontally to the Choose action hyperlink in the same row. Then, click on Choose, as shown in the next screenshot:

  1. 11. Moodle will display chapter01/quiz0102.html in the File name textbox. This is the web page that will run the exercise previously created using JQuiz.

  2. 12. Scroll down and click on the Save and display button, located at the bottom of the web page. The web browser will show the discovering exercise with a multiple-choice format, as shown in the next screenshot:

What just happened?

We added the discovering sentences related to 3D scenes exercise to a Moodle course. Now, the students are going to be able to run the activity by clicking on its hyperlink on the corresponding week.

We used the previously created folder, chapter01. We uploaded the bitmap image with the rendered 3D scene and the HTML file created with JQuiz (quiz0102.html).

Organizing the exercises' files using folders

We created a folder, chapter01, in which we uploaded all the files for both the matching composite pictures and the discovering sentences exercises. However, sometimes, we need to organize the exercises' files using additional folders.

For example, we can organize the files using the following structure:

  • chapter01

    • exercise01

    • exercise02

We can create two sub-folders, exercise01 and exercise02, in the chapter01 folder. This way, all the files related to the second exercise would have to be uploaded in the chapter01/exercise02 folder.

Note

The organization scheme chosen for the files will depend on the number of exercises and their relationship with your courses. However, in order to simplify your work, it is a good practice to keep all the files related to an exercise in a single folder. You can work with files in different folders; however, it will require you to work with complex paths in HTML code.