Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Math

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Math

Overview of this book

Moodle is a popular e-learning platform that is making inroads into all areas of the curriculum. Using moodle helps you to develop exciting, interactive, and engaging online math courses. But teaching math requires use of graphs, equations, special notation, and other features that are not built into Moodle. Using Moodle to teach Mathematics presents its own challenges. The book will show you how to set-up a Moodle course to support the teaching of mathematics. It will also help you to carefully explore the Moodle plugins that allow the handling of equations and enable other frequently used mathematical activities. Taking a practical approach, this book will introduce you to the concepts of converting mathematics teaching over to Moodle. It provides you with everything you need to include mathematical notation, graphs, images, video, audio, and more in your Moodle courses. By following the practical examples in this book, you can create feature-rich quizzes that are automatically marked, use tools to monitor student progress, employ modules and plugins allowing students to explore mathematical concepts. You'll also learn the integration of presentations, interactive math elements, SCORM, and Flash objects into Moodle. It will take you through these elements in detail and help you learn how to create, edit, and integrate them into Moodle. Soon you will develop your own exciting, interactive, and engaging online math courses with ease.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Math
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
Preface

Chapter 2. Getting Started with Mathematical Notation

In Chapter 1 we began converting our teaching over to Moodle. We uploaded a past paper and complemented that with a forum—an online discussion area. At the end of the previous chapter, I mentioned that my students and I were struggling to include mathematical notation, so in this chapter we will learn how to include mathematical notation in our Moodle courses. There are two ways of including math notation: by using third-party equation editors (for example, the Equation Editor included in Microsoft Office) or by using built-in Moodle "filters". We will be investigating both third-party equation editors and the Moodle Algebra Filter (of all the special math filters included in a basic Moodle installation, the Algebra Filter is the easiest to configure and use).

In this chapter we will learn the following:

  • How equation editors can be used to create mathematical notation

  • How Moodle writes its own mathematical notation using the Algebra Filter...