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

Managing student participation with Moodle generated reports


The report features of Moodle allow you to get an idea of when and how students are accessing and participating in your courses. The level of participation and quality of participation might be useful for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) as a gauge as to the effectiveness of your teaching strategies and material. If a student is not meeting their targets, but claims that they are spending the requisite number of hours on the online material, it is easy enough to create a report about this to see if they are indeed logging on at home and what they are looking at. For example, you could choose the Participation report under the reports menu on the course, as shown in the following screenshot:

You can select the homework assignment activity or activities, and quickly see who has accessed them. The following screenshot shows a report of student's activity (or lack thereof) on the assignments associated with a Food Technology course. In this case, three students have not read the material set for homework so they are not allowed to undertake a practical assignment in class as they are underprepared.