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 - running the matching composite pictures activity


It is time to run the activity as a student and to check the results as a teacher.

  1. 1. Click on the course name (School) and click on the Switch role to combo box (located on the left-hand side of the Turn editing on button) and select Student.

  2. 2. Click on the Matching composite pictures link on the corresponding week. The web browser will show the matching exercise with a drag/drop format.

  3. 3. Drag-and-drop each sentence to its corresponding image, as shown in the following screenshot:

  1. 4. After repeating the aforementioned step for the four sentences, click on the Check button to test the results, as shown in the next screenshot:

  1. 5. If the student's score is 100%, Moodle will save the results and will go back to the course web page.

  2. 6. Run the exercise with a different number of correct matches and click on the Check button each time. Moodle will remove the incorrect matches and will let you run the activity again. However, it will save the student's results for each attempt.

  3. 7. Click on the Return to my normal role button (located on the upper right-hand side corner of the web page). You are a teacher again.

  4. 8. Click on Hot Potatoes Quizzes in the Activities panel. The number of attempts will appear in the Attempts column, as shown in the next screenshot:

  5. 9. Next, click on the View reports link for the row corresponding to the Matching composite pictures activity and Moodle will display details about all the attempts, grouped by user name, as shown in the next screenshot:

What just happened?

In this activity, we worked with sentences and composite images. Our goal was that the child reads and understands the sentences alone, with the help of a therapist or a family member, so that he/she can run the exercise.

The activity consists of matching one sentence whose meaning belongs to a composite image. We applied the following concepts and resources:

  • Size notions: For this reason, we have chosen school-related objects with different sizes.

  • Quantity notions: We worked with composite images, showing more than one element per picture box.

  • Sensory perception resources: We simplified the execution of the activity using colors. In this case, the sentences talking about big things use the background color found in the related composite pictures.

Note

We can increase or decrease the complexity of this exercise using different combinations of colors. For example, if we want to create a simple activity, we can use the same foreground and background colors for each matching pair.