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


In this chapter, we will explore modules that you can use to draw students into shared activities, in order to promote communities of learning within a course.

Mindmapping

Mindmaps are a great tool for collecting together the thoughts of a group of people. Creating and sharing mindmaps is the purpose of one contributed activity module.

  • Mindmap module

Social bookmarking

The web is a great source of useful (and sometimes not so useful) information. It can be hard for a teacher to track down a decent collection of web links, so why not ask students to do this and make this part of their learning.

  • Social Bookmarking module

Quick messaging

Moodle provides a chat facility, but it is removed from the general context of the course page. There is one block that allows users to write quick messages without leaving the course page.

  • Shoutbox block

Drawing students into chats, forums, and blogs

The chat, forum, and blog facilities of Moodle are well designed and very useful for teaching. Students...