Book Image

Moodle 2 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds Beginner's Guide

By : Mary Cooch
Book Image

Moodle 2 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds Beginner's Guide

By: Mary Cooch

Overview of this book

Moodle is a very popular e-learning tool in universities and high schools. But what does it have to offer younger students who want a fun, interesting, interactive, and informative learning experience? Moodle empowers teachers to achieve all this and more and this book will show you how!Moodle 2 For Teaching 7-14 Year Olds will show complete beginners in Moodle with no technical background how to make the most of its features to enhance the learning and teaching of children aged around 7-14. The book focuses on the unique needs of young learners to create a fun, interesting, interactive, and informative learning environment your students will want to go to day after day.This is a practical book for teachers, written by a teacher with two decades of practical experience, latterly in using Moodle to motivate younger students. Learn how to put your lessons online in minutes; how to set creative homework that Moodle will mark for you and how to get your students working together to build up their knowledge. Throughout the book we will build a course from scratch, adaptable for ages 7 to 14, on Rivers and Flooding. You can adapt this to any topic, as Moodle lends itself to all subjects and ages.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Moodle 2 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Time for action — customizing our course page


We're going to change the course name and add some sections in the central area for our work!

  1. 1. In the Settings block, click the arrow next to Course administration and then click on Edit settings.

  2. 2. Next to Course full name, type in the full name of your course (such as Rivers and Flooding).

  3. 3. Next to Course short name, give your course an abbreviation, which will be seen on the navigation bar. For our example course, we'll use R & F.

  4. 4. In Course summary, write a sentence or two to explain what the course is about.

  5. 5. Scroll down to the sections shown in the following screenshot:

  6. 6. For Format, you can use Weekly format to include one section per week, or select Topic format to use numbered sections that you can set up as you like. For this example, we will select Topic format. (You might have other options, but these are the two most useful ones for us).

  7. 7. In the Number of weeks/topics field, choose the number of days, weeks, or topics that you want to include on your course page (you can change this at any time). For this example, we will specify 4.

  8. 8. If you want your course to start on a particular date (and not immediately), specify this date in the Course start date field.

    For now, as a beginner, this much will be enough.

    Note

    If at first you don't know what it means, it's safe to ignore it! This applies to Moodle activities as well as the course settings.

  9. 9. Click on Save changes. Your course page should now look something like this:

What just happened?

We just began customizing our course page the way we want it to look. We've now got the title we want, and the middle section (where our work will go) is now divided into separate numbered sections—four, for us—which will help us to organize our project.

At the moment, there's nothing next to these numbers. We need to get into each section, give it a heading, and prepare it so that we can add our worksheets and lessons, which we will do in future chapters of this book. There's something called News forum too, which I'll describe later.

We've also still got those blocks on either side. We need the Navigation block to find our way around, and the Settings block lets us organize our course and lets everyone manage their profiles—but what about the others? What are they for? Do we need them? How do we change them? In fact, how do we change anything on the page?