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

Science modules


The reason I wanted to include a short section on science teaching in a mathematics book is that I often get asked about mathematical notation by science teachers, which is understandable, but I also get asked about chemical symbols, too:

For example, included in the following screenshot is the LaTeX code needed to produce the chemical equation for the Haber Process:

Note that not all LaTeX interpreters can support the more general typesetting notation like the reversible reaction symbol.

I also get asked about representing chemical structures in Moodle courses. A great free tool is Jmol (http://www.jmol.org/). Jmol is an open source Java viewer for chemical structures in 3D. The molecules themselves are described in special files (with the extension .pdb) that are freely available to download from the Internet. For example, a good source of these special files for simple molecules is http://qsad.bu.edu/data/pdbfiles/, provided by the Quantum Science Across Disciplines (QSAD...