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 7. More Mathematical Notation

In Chapter 2, we investigated two ways of including mathematical notation in our Moodle courses. The first was to use third-party applications (Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org) to generate the notation that we then copy into our courses. The second was to have the notation generated from within Moodle using a special filter—the Algebra Filter. In this chapter, we will investigate three more filters that you can use to generate mathematical notation:

  • TeX

  • jsMath

  • ASCIIMathML

All three generate more advanced mathematical notation than can be achieved using the Algebra Filter. Both the TeX and jsMath filters use a special typesetting language called LaTeX (pronounced lah-tek), which we will be learning about in this chapter. However, ASCIIMathML doesn't use LaTeX. Also, it has the advantage that the notation it creates is far more accessible when displayed to the students even if they are blind or visually impaired.

At this stage you may be concerned that you...