Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Top Extensions Cookbook

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Top Extensions Cookbook

Overview of this book

Moodle is growing at a seemingly unstoppable rate. One of the key reasons for its popularity lies in its potential to extend with modules, thus making the site easier to administer, add new features, and completely change the way it looks. This book finds you the best Moodle modules, teaches you how to install them, and helps you to master their configuration.There are hundreds of Moodle modules available. Find out which you can trust and how to put them to work. This practical book gives you hands-on experience on using and managing Moodle modules, thus making your learning website feature-rich. It covers many features and techniques in order to allow you to organize your ideas to improve teaching using Moodle as a virtual learning platformThis book begins with simple activities such as adding and installing modules. Then, it moves to a very interesting topic about the integration of multimedia into Moodle, covering major multimedia elements such as images, audio, and video. Social networking applications like Twitter and Facebook are embedded in the Moodle course in order to invent stories, create group works, and create social team interactions with the virtual classroom. But the book doesn't end there, you will also see how to use Moodle to accept and assess coursework submissions, discuss work with students, and deliver quizzes, tests, and videos.The book ends with a chapter full of simple challenges such as adding educational games. This book is written to help you find modules that will be useful to you and your students, and to show examples of how these modules can be setup and used in teaching.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Top Extensions Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Introduction


Moodle employs a very simple navigation model. Course links are all shown on the course main page, so users are only one click away from a resource or activity. However, this simple, shallow navigation comes at a cost—long course pages.

In a real course with content that spans an entire teaching period, the length of course pages can grow many screens. Apart from the annoying scrolling needed to locate links, the sheer number of links can cause relevant content to become lost in a tangle of sameness. These modules allow teachers to focus student attention to what is current and important.

This chapter looks at modules that can be added to Moodle that attempt to address the need to better manage the space in a course page and offer easier navigation to users.

Adding main page content into a block

One way to remove content from the central sections of a course main page is to put it into a block. It is possible to put links to resources and activities in a block. As well as creating...