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-uploading images to our Moodle page


Now that we have set up our Moodle course page. Let’s make it a little more attractive by adding images.

  1. 1. Turn on editing.

  2. 2. Click on the editing icon for a topic section (for us, Topic 1).

  3. 3. Click on the icon that helps you insert an image , as shown in the following screenshot:

  4. 4. In the box that is displayed next, click on the folder named images.

  5. 5. In the box that is displayed next, scroll down to where you can see the Browse button.

  6. 6. Click on the Browse button and locate the image that you want, on your computer. (It should either have the extension .jpg or .gif.)

  7. 7. Select your image and then click Open, and it will appear in the Browse box above.

  8. 8. Click on the Upload button.

  9. 9. Your image's filename will appear in the leftmost section of the next screen. Click on it, and it will be previewed in the rightmost section:

  10. 10. Note that your image's filename is also displayed at the top where it says Image URL.

  11. 11. Underneath that, add some descriptive text, explaining the photo, in the Alternate text box. (Don't just say photo!)

  12. 12. Click on OK.

  13. 13. Click on Save changes, to make the image appear on your course page.

What just happened?

We've now added our first image to our Moodle course page to brighten it up! It probably seems like an extremely long-winded way of adding an image, but that's only because it's the first time that we did it. Additionally, remember that we made a folder to put all of our images in, and we won't need to do that again. The more often that you upload images, the quicker it becomes. I can add images now in a matter of seconds; you will be able to do so as well, with practice. Just bear in mind the following points:

  • Get your image to the right size before you upload it to Moodle.

  • Make sure that you are uploading an image file—usually having the extension, .jpg or .gif (more on this, later).

  • Don't copy and paste an image from the internet. If the site—that the image comes from—ever goes offline, your image will vanish, and you'll end up with a red X.

Have a go hero-add an image to your HTML block

Remember our Welcome block? If you click on the editing icon there, Moodle will operate in exactly the same way as it does with the topic summaries. Go back and insert an image there! (Again, not too large an image!) And then move the block so that it is positioned on the upper left of our page, where the eye will naturally start reading from, when a student enters the course. You should now have something like this:

Compare this screenshot with our first view of the course page, as shown here:

Better already!

Note

If you want to get rid of the News forum, as I have, then you need to change the number of news items to 0 in the course settings, in the Administration block. Then, with the editing turned on, click on the X icon next to the News forum, to delete it.