Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Design and Technology

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Design and Technology

Overview of this book

Educators use the Moodle web application to create effective online learning sites. Creating such learning environments that suit Design and Technology subjects requires understanding and implementation of both basic and advanced Moodle features.This book takes a detailed look at Moodle features with examples of how to fully support the Design and Technology curricula using Moodle. It will guide you to incorporate specific modules and blocks to enhance learning as well as allow detailed tracking of performance by using formative and summative assessment tools with ease.We start with setting up a very basic Moodle course for Design and Technology, and then set up some basic resources and some interactive material. You will customize your own courses and create a course for each of the key areas of the DT subjects and add material to them. We will create some basic reporting and assessment tools and enhance the look of the course. We will use Moodle's detailed and sophisticated gradebook to assess your student s ' learning progress in activities from an assignment to an offline activity. Then we will support students in designing a product or trying a new recipe in food technology in market research to find out exactly what the public wants in relation to their product, by designing a questionnaire. We will allow product design or resistant material students use the HTML features of the questionnaire module to incorporate images into the questions to make it clearer to respondents what it is they are trying to make and sell.We will allow students in construction to gather and organize their research material in a great deal of detail and also allow them to better understand their target market and the materials used in their construction through detailed questioning. We will allow food technology students to discuss and receive constructive feedback on food products that contribute to health issues that will enable them to make informed decisions and therefore better quality products. Then we explore several components within Moodle's core functionality and some third-party sources to display the progress of the student's work and development. We then have an overview of the different design portfolios available. Finally we look at additional ways to enhance the teaching and learning of D ' T with Moodle using third-party modules and add-ons.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 for Design and Technology
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Creating a new course


In the example site, there is a course for each of the key areas of the DT subjects, and these are broken down into the levels that correspond with qualifications in the UK:

There will obviously be some overlap as many of the subjects will cover all of these levels. However, for now this is a useful way to organize the subject matter. The courses themselves can then be created in one or all of these categories. The way that they are organized will depend on how the institution manages all teaching on a VLE. As you can see in the previous screenshot, you have the Add new category and Add a new course buttons to add new categories and courses respectively. The following example shows a possible approach to structuring the courses within a level. It shows all Level 2 courses:

As stated earlier, these are the UK subject areas, but they are the subject areas that are general to the field of DT and therefore useful as vehicles for understanding the processes of this book.

The courses themselves are then organized in relation to the exam board specifications. For example, the main areas of resistant materials then become the labels that make up a course structure.

The type of layout shown in the previous screenshot has been organized by the topic's course format. When setting up a course, there are currently several styles that can be used, such as topics or weekly. The style chosen would depend on how you wish to deliver your learning material. It could also be organized on a monthly basis, which is useful for intensive revision periods before public examinations. In many cases, students will work through the material at different times, so a topic-based approach will allow them to access the material they need, while still seeing the overall picture of the course. A weekly layout, though more detailed, may be somewhat overwhelming. If you are working in a blended environment, where there are specific dates associated with your meetings with students, you may choose the weekly format. This format will track the course with dates so that students know very specifically the stage they have reached.

Adding resource materials to your basic Moodle site

Once you have set up the basic working course layout, it is time to start adding the resources and materials, as well as interactive elements that will bring the course to life for your students.