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 drawing and illustration according to speech bubbles to an existing Moodle course.

  1. 1. Log in to your Moodle server. Remember to click on the Return to my normal role button if necessary.

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

  3. 3. Edit the summary for a new week. Enter Exercise 3 in Summary and click on the Save changes button.

  4. 4. Click on the Add an activity combo box for the selected week and choose Upload a single file.

  5. 5. Enter Drawing with a digital pen in Assignment name.

  6. 6. Select Impact in font and 5 (18) in size—the first two combo boxes below Description.

  7. 7. Click on the Font Color button (a T with six color boxes) and select your desired color for the text.

  8. 8. Click on the big text box below Description and enter Draw an illustration of one of the characters according to the speech bubbles. This is the description of the student's goal for this exercise.

  9. 9. Press Enter and click on the Insert Image button (a mountain or a tree, according to the Moodle version). A new web page will appear displaying the title Insert image.

  10. 10. Click on chapter01.

  11. 11. Click on the Browse button. Browse to the folder that holds the comic strip image (C:\School) and select the file to upload, halloweenstrip01.png. Then, click on Open and on the Upload button. The label File uploaded successfully will appear inside the File browser box.

  12. 12. Next, click on the name of the recently uploaded file, halloweenstrip01.png. The image will appear in the Preview box, as shown in the next screenshot:

  1. 13. Enter Halloween comic strip in Alternate text. This text will appear if the web browser is not capable of downloading the image. It is a required field for this page.

  2. 14. Click on OK. The image will appear below the previously entered title. You can click on the Enlarge editor button (a diagonal arrow with two squares) and you will be able to view the title and the whole image, as shown in the next screenshot:

  1. 15. Close the enlarged editor's window.

  2. 16. Select 10MB in Maximum size. This is the maximum size for the file that each student is going to be able to upload as a result for this activity. However, it is very important to check the possibilities offered by your Moodle server with its Moodle administrator.

  3. 17. Scroll down and click on the Save and display button. The web browser will show the description and the previously uploaded image with the speech bubbles.

What just happened?

We added the drawing exercise to a Moodle course. The students are now going to be able to upload results for this activity after reading the goals and clicking on its hyperlink in the corresponding week.

We used the previously created folder, chapter01. We uploaded the bitmap image with the speech bubbles organized in a comic strip (halloweenstrip01.png). We added a title with a customized font and color using the description's editor.

The Upload a single file activity allowed us to describe the goals for the activity using a paragraph and an image.