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 discovering sentences activity


It is time to run the discovering sentences activity as a student.

  1. 1. Click on the course name (School) and switch your role to student.

  2. 2. Click on the Discovering sentences related to 3D scenes link on the corresponding week. The web browser will show the multiple-choice exercise.

  3. 3. Click on the button above the right-hand side sentence, as shown in the next screenshot. Moodle will save the results and go back to the course.

  1. 4. Repeat the aforementioned steps (1 to 3) and then click on the button above one of the wrong sentences. Moodle will display a message allowing you to try again and will show an X on the previously clicked wrong answer, as shown in the next screenshot. However, it will save your first wrong attempt in order to calculate a fair score.

  1. 5. Now, click on the View reports link for the row corresponding to the Discovering sentences related to 3D scenes 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 a 3D scene. The objective was to select among several sentences the correct one describing the composite 3D image that was presented in the activity.

Why did we use 3D illustrations? We used them with the purpose of stimulating the motivation, because one of the features of these images is that they are realistic and children are attracted to them.

The activity consists of clicking on the sentence that explains the situation illustrated in the 3D scene. We applied the following concepts and resources in order to stimulate both the attention and the concentration:

  • Reading comprehension: The child has to read and understand each of the sentences

  • Listening comprehension: If the child can't read and understand the sentences alone, he/she can can run the exercise with the help of a therapist or a family member

  • Space notions: The sentences describe the location of the elements within a specific space

Note

We can also 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 add a background color to the 3D scene and we can use this color as the foreground for the correct sentence.