Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Moodle is a very popular e-learning tool in universities and high schools. But what does it have to offer younger students who want a fun, interesting, interactive, and informative learning experience? Moodle empowers teachers to achieve all this and more and this book will show you how! This book will show complete beginners in Moodle with no technical background how to make the most of its features to enhance the learning and teaching of children aged around 7-14. This is a practical book for teachers, written by a teacher with two decades of practical experience, latterly in using Moodle to motivate younger students. Its aim is to give you some hints and advice on how to get your Moodle courses up and running with useful content that your students will actually want to go and learn from on a regular basis. We will assume that you have an installation of Moodle managed by somebody else, so you are responsible only for creating and delivering course content. Throughout the book we will be building a course from scratch, adaptable for ages 7 to 14 on Rivers and Flooding It could be any topic, as Moodle lends itself to all subjects and ages.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds
Credits
About the author
About the reviewers
Preface

First impressions


Let's assume you've been given an empty Moodle course page. When you first go to your course page, you'll probably see something that looks like this:

Don't be disheartened if this doesn't mean much to you at this stage. If you were to flick through to the end of the book, you would find our completed work far more welcoming:

There are three columns; two narrow ones on the right and left, containing some blocks, and a wider column in the middle. This wider column is the work area, to which we will start adding our teaching materials (this will be covered in detail in Chapter 2). The name of the course (Empty Course, for now) appears on the upper left, and an abbreviated version (empty) will appear in the bar below it (the bar is called a breadcrumb trail). The block called Administration is just for the teachers. It allows us (teachers) to perform various actions for our course. Let's start by changing the course name to what we want, and setting up the work area to something more suitable for us.

Note

Don't be put off by the word Course. A course can be anything you want it to be—a teacher's class page, a single unit of work (such as ours), a project, a year's lessons shared among a group of teachers, and so on.