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

Customizing the middle section


It is finally time to get to grips with the middle section—the one we shall be focusing on in the next few chapters. So far, our Rivers and Flooding course has got four empty topic sections. Our next task is to get them ready for action—ready for the materials that we will create and upload, from the next chapter onwards.

If you look at the following screenshot, you will see that at the top it says Topic outline. We cannot change these words easily, but we can use the blank space at the top to provide a short description of what our course is about, and we can add headings to each of the four sections.

Remember that to do anything on this page now, we need to have editing turned on (via the button on the upper right) and then, in order to type directly into Moodle, we have to click on the pen, hand, or paper icon that we had came across in the HTML block. You can see one above the News forum, and one next to the numbered sections:

Clicking on the very top one, above the News forum, sends us to a page—Summary of General. It would be the same if we had clicked on any of the numbered topics (or weeks, if you've chosen them). It would say Summary of week/topic and provide a textbox in the text editor.

Using the text editor

We enter our descriptions/headings directly into this box. You will recognize some of the icons from many popular word processing programs, and if you move your cursor over a particular icon, it will give you a hint as to what it does. Younger children like bright colors in a large font, so I'm going to make my headings big and red, but it's worth bearing in mind here that you might have children in your class who are color blind or have other visual impairments, so check with your Special Educational needs specialist which would be the safe colors to use.

Go along the layers of icons and find out what they do. Type in some text and experiment! Some are pretty self-explanatory. The following table explains a few of the icons you might find useful, but that are less obvious. The numbers in the table refer to the icons in the following screenshot:

Icon

What it does

1

Improves the look of your text if you paste it directly from Microsoft Word.

2

Lets you cancel what you just did and revert to an earlier stage.

3

Enlarges the text box to make it easier for you to see and type.

4

Lets you create a link to a website or an online file.

5

Lets you insert an image.

6

Allows you to easily add sound or videos.

7

Lets you create a table to improve the layout of your text area.

8

Lets you into the HTML code area (some uses for us later!)

9

Allows you to check the spellings of words you type.

Once you've typed in your text and adapted it according to your requirements, scroll down and click on Save changes. Only then will your efforts be visible on the main course page. Until that moment, you can change whatever you wish.

Have a go hero — give titles to each section of your course

We have just given a heading to Topic 0—the top section of our course. If you click on the editing icon for each of the other four topics, you can do exactly the same with them. Remember to change the color, font style, and size (if you wish) from a rather uninteresting default style. Either go for it and add your own titles to the sections of your course, or practice with the ones we're going to use in our ongoing example. They are:

  • Famous Rivers of the World

  • How does a river flow?

  • Why do rivers flood?

  • Flooding case studies

Note

Want to make your section headings easy to see in the Navigation block?

If you take out the check in Use default section name as shown in the following screenshot, and then add your title, the section heading will appear in the Navigation block once you've added some resources. If you type into the text editor box instead, it will just show the section number.

What just happened?

We now have headings for each of our topic sections. The page looks more personal and brighter already! A few photographs would enhance it though; let's put some on our course page now!