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

Summary


In this chapter, we have learned how to:

  • Create many visually rich activities combining animations, effects, text, pictures, and sounds.

  • Work with several tools to create realistic activities that can improve the student's short-term memory management

  • Use JClic Author to create a finding pairs of matching animations exercise

  • Use animated GIF graphics to represent each virtual card

  • Install a module to integrate the new JClic activity in Moodle

  • Create a slide-show with PowerPoint and use Wondershare PPT to Video 6 in order to export a video in the Flash Video (FLV) format, compatible with Moodle

  • Use an online text assignment to create a visual exercise that enables the student to view the slide show and to memorize the list of words organized in rows, shown with nice animations and effects

Now that we have learned how to create exercises for short-term memory improvement, we're ready to prepare exercises to reduce attention deficit disorder, which is the topic of the next chapter.