Moodle 2.5 Multimedia provides you with everything you need to include pictures, sound, video, animations, interactive elements, and more in your Moodle courses. You'll develop Moodle courses that you are proud of and that your students enjoy.
This book was written around the design of an online course called Music for everyday life using Moodle, where teachers and students will be required to create, share, and discuss multimedia works. Music was chosen as the main theme because besides being fun and horizontal to all cultures, it's a subject that can easily gather contributions from areas such as Science (for example, Waves and Sound), Geography (with instruments from around the world, such as the Ukulele), Languages (music in itself is a language), World History (from medieval music to jazz), or even Social Sciences (the law around creative works). This book was not made for musicians in particular, and one of its main challenges was to reach different educators from different subjects. Music is simply the way to get all of these perspectives working together.
Throughout the book, we will create some dozens of multimedia artifacts that are hopefully relevant, easy-to-do, and as little time-consuming as possible, to develop for us teachers and trainers with busy schedules. And for this, we will use multiple platforms, free software, and web applications.
Better learning is not necessarily a consequence of instruction, so the focus of the proposed activities will be on giving the learner better opportunities to create and share multimedia artifacts, and to dialog about and reflect on these constructions with others. I hope you enjoy it.
Chapter 1, Getting Ready for Multimedia in Moodle, takes a look at the evolution of multimedia, its advantages and uses in teaching and learning, and how these can be used with Moodle. We will also see some of the requirements for using multimedia in Moodle, and configure it accordingly. We will make three simple experiments in a forum with pictures, sound, and video, to see if everything is working as expected while integrating these in Moodle.
Chapter 2, Picture This, deals with images, so we will look at different ways of finding and inserting images in Moodle. We then learn about image editing tasks, commented screenshots, and comic strips. We will also learn how to export presentations as images, adding them to a Moodle lesson, or as an alternative, publishing these presentations in an online service.
Chapter 3, Sound and Music, focuses on tasks for the Moodle integration of sound and music elements. The resources created will make information available in improved ways to students, and will also get them to create audio works, such as soundtracks, slices, remixes, voice recordings, text-to-speech, and podcasts.
Chapter 4, Video, focuses on video production and editing, looking at different ways of using these in Moodle. We will start by looking at places to find free videos online, find ways of downloading videos from online services, extract DVD selections, create photo stories, screencasts, online TVs, and stop motion videos.
Chapter 5, Understanding Web-based Applications and Other Multimedia Forms, focuses on activities that we can do with Moodle and web tools. We will create interactive floor plans, timelines, maps, online presentations, gadgets to represent data, and mind maps.
Chapter 6, Multimedia and Assessments, deals with multimedia elements in quizzes, lessons, and assignments. We will use applications that allow us to create interactive exercises and games that can be easily assessed from and integrated into Moodle, such as crosswords, puzzles, and matching pairs among others. We will look at rubrics as ways of assessing multimedia works in a quick and easy way.
Chapter 7, Synchronous Communication and Interaction, teaches us how to interact with students in Moodle courses in real time by using an online chat and online meeting service. This allows text, audio, and video chat and also a sketchpad, file sharing, recording, and desktop and screen sharing.
Chapter 8, Common Multimedia Issues in Moodle, deals with some common issues on multimedia in Moodle related to copyright, e-safety, referencing sources, and other similar issues. We conclude with some possible modules and plugins to install in Moodle to expand its possibilities and some criteria for selecting web applications for our classes.
Let's establish as a basic requirement associated with this book the following hardware:
A consumer digital camera (or a nice smartphone or tablet) that captures videos and photos with 2 megapixels or more
A webcam with a minimum of 640 x 480 pixels video and photo resolution
A headset (better than just a microphone because if you have the computer speakers on, there is the risk of feedback)
A computer with an Internet connection (of course)
It is also assumed that the computer that will be used to perform the tasks presented in the book has a Microsoft (XP or 7), Mac, or GNU/Linux operating system and some minimum requirements, such as more than 1 GB of memory (ideally more than 2 GB), at least one USB port, headphones, a microphone, the respective ports for these, and enough free disk space to install and use the applications suggested in this book (10 GB should be enough).
For the rest of the requirements, free software will do the trick. The required software are:
Moodle 2.5 (well, can't run away from it)
A web browser for all the web applications we will be using (for example, Stripgenerator, SlideShare, Animoto, Grooveshark, Voki, PodOmatic, YouTube, KeepVid, Google Hangouts, Google Drive, Floorplanner, Mindomo, Tiki-Toki, Google Maps Engine, Prezi, and Google+ Hangouts on Air)
GIMP 2.8.4
Jing 2.6
VLC 2.0.6
Audacity 2.0.3
Microsoft PowerPoint or similar
Windows Movie Maker 2012
JellyCam
Hot Potatoes 6
JClic
The book is primarily aimed at teachers and trainers who run professional courses and have experience in the use of Moodle. At the same time, it is not necessary to have an advanced technical background to create multimedia elements, as the tasks will be simple and as little time-consuming as possible, relevant to everyday use.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Paste the code after the HTML tag <p>."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the HTML button to switch to HTML mode."
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