Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Multimedia

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Multimedia

Overview of this book

In today's world, multimedia can provide a more engaging experience for learners. You can embed your own audio, link to pages off-site, or pull a YouTube video into your course. You can use feature-rich quizzes that allow you to assess your students, or provide them with tools and feedback to test their own knowledge. All these require standard procedures and cutting-edge tools. Selecting tools to make multimedia integration in Moodle faster, simpler, and more precise is not child's play. This book provides you with everything you need to include sound, video, animation, and more in your Moodle courses. You'll develop Moodle courses that you are proud of, and that your students enjoy. This book covers integration of multimedia into Moodle, covering major multimedia elements such as images, audio, and video. It will take you through these elements in detail where you will learn how to create, edit, and integrate these elements into Moodle. The book is written around the design of an online course called "Music for Everyday Life" using Moodle, where teachers and students create, share, and discuss multimedia elements. You will also learn how to use Web 2.0 tools to create images, audio, and video and then we will take a look at the web applications that allow easy creation, collaboration, and sharing of multimedia elements. Finally, you will learn how to interact with students in real-time using a particular online phone service and a desktop sharing application.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Multimedia
Credits
About the author
About the reviewers
Preface

Finding free videos online


We should always keep in mind that we can use Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive (for example, http://www.archive.org/details/moviesandfilms) for downloading and using videos in our video projects. Although these are very useful, they are not the only services available; we can find many others, with particular interest to teachers and trainers. TeacherTube (http://teachertube.com) and YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) are the most well-known, and have lots of useful stuff.

But, before we see reference websites where we can find interesting videos and embed them in our courses, let's first have a look at the basics of video formats.

The basics of video formats

With video, things start to get complicated concerning formats. Rates, bitrates, codecs, formats, sizes, frame rates, and on top of this, all of the audio varieties, can overwhelm us. You should know some of these formats:

  • DV: The format usually used by digital cameras for high quality video, corresponding...