Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Top Extensions Cookbook

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Top Extensions Cookbook

Overview of this book

Moodle is growing at a seemingly unstoppable rate. One of the key reasons for its popularity lies in its potential to extend with modules, thus making the site easier to administer, add new features, and completely change the way it looks. This book finds you the best Moodle modules, teaches you how to install them, and helps you to master their configuration.There are hundreds of Moodle modules available. Find out which you can trust and how to put them to work. This practical book gives you hands-on experience on using and managing Moodle modules, thus making your learning website feature-rich. It covers many features and techniques in order to allow you to organize your ideas to improve teaching using Moodle as a virtual learning platformThis book begins with simple activities such as adding and installing modules. Then, it moves to a very interesting topic about the integration of multimedia into Moodle, covering major multimedia elements such as images, audio, and video. Social networking applications like Twitter and Facebook are embedded in the Moodle course in order to invent stories, create group works, and create social team interactions with the virtual classroom. But the book doesn't end there, you will also see how to use Moodle to accept and assess coursework submissions, discuss work with students, and deliver quizzes, tests, and videos.The book ends with a chapter full of simple challenges such as adding educational games. This book is written to help you find modules that will be useful to you and your students, and to show examples of how these modules can be setup and used in teaching.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Top Extensions Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Introduction


Education need not be dull and boring all the time. This chapter is about the extras that make learning that bit more exciting.

Remembering birthdays

Part of learning is being a member of a learning community. One way to familiarize members with each other is to share the excitement of birthdays. With a little poking and prodding, Moodle can be used to keep track of users' dates of birth, and using these, there is a block that can show you who is celebrating a birthday today or in the near future.

  • Birthday block

Using emoticons

Emoticons are short pictorial expressions that can enliven a text message. The emoticon icons available in the Skype instant messenger have been made available and can be inserted into Moodle text when the appropriate filter is installed.

  • Skype icons filter

Playing with themes

One of the things that many users love doing is fiddling with colors and themes. Moodle allows the theme of the site to be altered and a number of themes are distributed with Moodle. It...