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

Setting up your Moodle environment


The final element of setting up your working course on Moodle is the course format. Various blocks can be added to the course in order to support and enhance learning and communication among course participants and these can be positioned in a way that makes your course more interactive and perhaps conducive to learning. You can add a calendar, which will tell students about upcoming events such as guest speakers, assignments that are pending, construction demonstrations held at local colleges, or quizzes that have been added. You can also enable a blogging facility so that students can post their own personal reflections on the course for others to read and comment upon their recent work placements. Blogs will be addressed in more detail in Chapter 3. You can add RSS blocks that will pull in information from other websites and keep students up-to-date in developments from companies and government departments. All of these can be arranged in the course format to encourage and stimulate learning and the exchange of information as much as possible. The more interactive these elements, hopefully the more engaged and interactive the students will become.

The previous screenshot shows that this course has a rolling news feed from the BBC technology website and also an add-on block called slideshowgallery, which rotates some of the student's work in a small block. These are only some of the multitude of blocks that can be added to a course, though it is always good not to overdo it. The amount of modules and blocks that can be added to your site is growing daily. Some of these are heavily developed by members of the Moodle core team, while others are personal projects that have been uploaded by users to share. It is best to try these on a test site before placing them on your main site.