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

Time for action-moving, adding, and deleting blocks


Let’s learn how to add and delete blocks into our Moodle course page.

  1. 1. To hide a block from students, click on the eye. (You will still be able to see it greyed out.) Click again to make it visible to students.

  2. 2. To delete a block from the course page, click on the X. (You can add it again later; it's not gone forever.)

  3. 3. To move a block up, click on the up arrow (blocks are moved up one block at a time).

  4. 4. To move a block down, click on the down arrow (blocks are moved down one block at a time).

  5. 5. To move a block to the other side, click the left or right arrow (the block will go across be positioned at the other side and to the bottom of the column).

  6. 6. To add a new block, find the block called Blocks, and then click on Add (as shown in the following screenshot).

  7. 7. The face icons are to do with who can see and edit the blocks (ignore these for now).

Useful (and less useful) blocks

Here's a table of the standard blocks that are available in Moodle, and that you could have on your course page (if you're allowed). I've explained what they do, and what I think about them:

Block name

What it does

Why use it

Activities

Shows the different activities that you've set up

If you want your students to get to certain activities quickly, or see them listed

Administration

The teacher's admin block

Essential for you, and it's where your students can see their grades

Blog menu/tags

Allows you to add and view blog entries and keywords in blogs

Not really necessary as a block (we look at blogs in chapter 6)

Calendar

A calendar where you can show course, individual, or site wide events

Useful if you have a lot of events that you want to remind your students about

Courses

Lists students courses

A quick way for them to get around their courses

Course description

Shows the course summary that you put in the course settings

Not really essential—they're doing the course now, after all!

Global search

Lets you search all of Moodle

Has to be switched on by your admin—and you don't need it—leave it out!

HTML

A blank block for your own use

Very handy—more details later

Latest news

Displays what's in the news forum

If you want that, it's fine!

Loan calculator

It Calculates interest on loans

Someone, somewhere must need it—but not us

Mentees block

Advanced block allowing mentors to 'watch' students

We don't need it at this stage

Messages

Moodle's instant messaging service

Needs to be switched on by your admin; useful for instant communication, but younger students may find it very distracting!

Online users

Shows who's accessing your course online at the moment

Useful for making sure that everyone's there, on task

People

Lists those enrolled in your course, and when they last visited your course page

Another useful block to keep a check on your participants.

Quiz results

Displays recent quiz results

Handy for encouraging competition amongst students, by providing a league table of scores.

Recent activity

Who's done what and when

Useful for students to see what's new, and for teachers to see who's sent in their work

Random glossary entry

Shows a glossary entry at a certain time (if you've got a glossary)

Think about this when we are making a glossary in chapter 3; up to you

Remote RSS feeds

Shows news feeds of your choice

Can be very useful— we'll look at this in the final chapter

Search forums

Allows students to search through forum entries

Don't bother with this; I've never found it useful for my classes

Section links

A quick way to get to a numbered section

If you want to, fine and good; useful if your sections are very long and need a lot of scrolling down

Upcoming events

Information about what's coming soon, taken from the calendar or activity deadlines

If you have a lot of events or deadlines it's useful.

Have a go hero-get the right choice of blocks for your course!

Ok, now it’s time to put the theory into practice! For our purposes, the best blocks will probably be the ones listed below. Using the instructions on the previous pages, delete the ones we don't want, add the new ones, and then arrange them equally on either side of the middle section! Let's have:

  • A People block

  • An Administration block (of course!)

  • A Courses block

  • A Calendar block

  • A Messages block

  • An HTML block (which we'll customize now)