Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Teaching Special Education Children (5-10): Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Teaching Special Education Children (5-10): Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Moodle is a free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. But what does it have to offer to the children with special educational needs who want a fun, inspiring, interactive, and informative learning experience? Moodle 1.9 empowers educators achieve all these set of rich experiences with many related activities - this book shows you how! This book offers solutions to developing interactive courses and therapies for children with special education needs who are between the age group of 5 to 10 years. It teaches to combine Moodle 1.9 with the opportunities offered by Web 2.0, free and commercial software, and general purpose hardware devices. This book will guide the reader step-by-step in using many different tools to create exciting experiences to offer great motivation to children with special educational needs, considering the opportunities for online education. This book will help the reader to build interactive and rich online content oriented to children with special educational needs using different techniques and open source tools. It teaches you to create exercises as if you were playing with children at the school, the zoo, the beach, the supermarket, a birthday party, an aquarium, a farm, at the shopping, a circus or at home. You will be able to work with drawings, music, sounds, videos, photographs and text, and you will combine all these pieces into nice experiences for children who need to find extra motivation to improve their learning skills. Besides, it will teach you to take advantage of general purpose, non-expensive hardware like gamepads, joysticks, digital pens also known as pen-sketches, multi-touch screens, netbooks and touchpads. The usage of some of these hardware devices combined with visually rich activities usually offer children an extra motivation to focus on solving the exercises.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 for Teaching Special Education Children (5-10 Year Olds)
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface

Time for action - combining pictures with different sizes


We are now going to manipulate, resize, and save the new versions of the combined pictures for the exercise using Inkscape.

  1. 1. Open the vector graphic file in Inkscape (C:\School\image010101.svg).

  2. 2. Click on the blackboard picture to select it. Eight double-headed arrows will appear in a rectangle around the selection, as shown in the following image:

  1. 3. Drag-and-drop one of the diagonal double-headed arrows and scale the image both in the horizontal (X) and vertical (Y) directions. You can do it holding the Ctrl key down in order to maintain the original aspect ratio.

  2. 4. Next, click on the eraser picture to select it and enlarge it to match the blackboard's size.

  3. 5. Drag-and-drop the eraser to move it below the blackboard, as shown in the next screenshot:

  1. 6. Select File | Save, to save the changes made to the original Inkscape SVG file.

  2. 7. Select File | Export Bitmap. A dialog box showing many export options will appear. Enter 30 on the first dpi (Dots Per Inch) textbox.

  3. 8. Click on the Drawing button, and then on Export. Inkscape will export the drawing in PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format. The exported bitmap graphics with a big blackboard and a big eraser will be saved in C:\School\image010101.png.

  4. 9. Next, open the other vector graphic file in Inkscape (C:\School\image010102.svg).

  5. 10. Repeat the aforementioned steps (2 to 7) to export a new bitmap graphic with a big case and a pair of big scissors, as shown in the next screenshot. The exported bitmap graphic will be C:\School\image010102.png.

  1. 11. Click on the case picture to select it and shrink it.

  2. 12. Click on the scissors picture to select it and shrink it to match the new smaller case's size.

  3. 13. Drag-and-drop the scissors to move them below the case, as shown in the next screenshot:

  1. 14. Select File | Save As, to save the new manipulated vector graphic with a new name. Enter image010103 as the new name and click on the Save button.

  2. 15. Select File | Export Bitmap. A dialog box showing many export options will appear. Click on the Drawing button, and then on Export. Inkscape will export the edited drawing in PNG format. The exported bitmap graphics file with a small case and a pair of small scissors will be C:\School\image010103.png.

  3. 16. Next open the previously manipulated vector graphic file in Inkscape (C:\School\image010101.svg).

  4. 17. Repeat the aforementioned steps (11 to 15) to edit the vector graphic and export a new bitmap with a small blackboard and a small eraser, as shown in the next image. Use image010104 as the new Inkscape file. Thus, the new exported bitmap graphic will be C:\School\image010104.png.

What just happened?

We edited the two pairs of 2D scalable clipart pictures using Inkscape. As we had used vector graphics to create the drawings, we could change their size without losing quality and we exported the resulting images to the PNG format.

Note

PNG is an open, extensible image format with lossless compression. Both Moodle and Hot Potatoes work great with PNG images. We didn't use the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format for these graphics, because it uses a lossy compression method, which removes some information from the image. As the exported images are small in size, we can use the PNG format.

We now have the following four bitmap graphics ready to be used in our matching composite pictures exercise:

  • image010101.png: A big blackboard and a big eraser

  • image010102.png: A big case and a pair of big scissors

  • image010103.png: A small case and a pair of small scissors

  • image010104.png: A small blackboard and a small eraser