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

Adding instructions with the web page resource


The other key (resource) feature of Moodle, which can be used to build up the structure of the course, is the web page (element) resource. This is accessed by choosing the Compose a web page in the drop-down resource list, which is part of resources, as shown in the following screenshot:

The nature of this should be quite self-explanatory as it presents a basic HTML editor for composing instructions or extra research material. However, the other great advantage is that once it has been composed, it becomes part of the system's database, and as such, can then be searched as with any other data. This is not possible with pre-formatted files, such as word-processed documents, though obviously they are convenient as they can be downloaded.

Since it is a web-based resource, it means that pictures and links can be embedded and the HTML features such as color coding can be used as well. In addition, if the auto-linking feature of Moodle has been enabled, any word that appears in this web page, that is, also in a glossary, will be linked. This is obviously an advantage in a jargon-rich subject such as design technology; it helps reinforce the student's grasp of the key terms. This will be shown in more detail in Chapter 5, Assessing Student Progress.