Schools, colleges, and universities all over the world are installing Moodle, but many educators aren't making much use of it. With so many features, it can be a hassle to learn—and with teachers under so much pressure day to day, they cannot devote time to recreating all their lessons from scratch.
This book shows you how to bring your existing notes, worksheets, resources, and lesson plans into Moodle quickly and easily. Instead of exploring every feature of Moodle, we focus on getting you started immediately. You will be turning your existing materials into Moodle courses right from the start.
We begin by showing you how to turn your teaching schedule into a Moodle course, with the correct number of topics and weeks. You will then see how to convert your resources—documents, slideshows, and worksheets—to Moodle. You will learn how to format them in a way that means students will be able to read them and along the way you will learn plenty of shortcuts to speed up the process.
By the end of Chapter 3, you will already have a Moodle course that contains your learning resources in a presentable way. But we don'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.
Our focus is on getting results fast—moving teaching material online so that lessons become more effective for students and less work for you.
Chapter 1: Going Electric—Explains why Moodle was created and how it is developed. You will learn how to log on and log out, explore the Moodle interface, and begin learning some Moodle terminology. You will also begin learning how to configure your user profile (that's how you present yourself to other Moodle users).
Chapter 2: Set Up Your Courses—Shows you how to map your academic curriculum to a number of Moodle courses. You will learn how to create a new Moodle course and give it a name and description, set up an appropriate structure for the course, and assign teaching staff. Then, we show you how to configure course enrollment and how to introduce students onto your course.
Chapter 3: Add Documents and Handouts—This is where you will start uploading your teaching materials to your newly configured Moodle course. You will learn which types of files are best to include in an online course, and how to create them. You will learn how to upload files to Moodle, organize them effectively, and how to present documents and handouts to students.
Chapter 4: Sound and Vision Including Multimedia Content—This chapter builds on chapter 3 by investigating the best ways of importing sound and vision into our courses. You will learn how to import both audio and video into your course.
Chapter 5: Moodle Makeover—This is where we learn how to make Moodle courses more than a long list of resources. Turn your course into an engaging and entertaining online learning experience. Find out where you can get lots of free images for your courses and explore different ways to use HTML (the language of the Internet) to make your courses even more fun.
Chapter 6: Managing Student Work—This chapter is an introduction to managing projects and assignments online. Learn how to mark student projects online, how to manage student grades—including specifying your own custom grades. You will learn how work can be passed between students and teachers online without resorting to email, burning CDs/DVDs, or students having to bring in work on a memory stick.
Chapter 7: Communicating Online—This chapter demonstrates how to chat to and message your students from within the safety and security of your Moodle. Learn all about real-time chat—Moodle's very own built-in instant messaging system (like MSN), which allows us to talk to students when they (or we) are out of the classroom. And learn how to contact your students using Moodle messaging—which can take the place of emails if your students don't have email addresses. Also learn how to add forums to your course—just like old-fashioned message boards, where you post a question or comment and later on someone posts a response.
Chapter 8: Enhancing Your Teaching—This is where we start to experiment with the more advanced features of Moodle. We learn how to convert tests and exams to Moodle quizzes. Learn how to convert role-play exercises and scenarios into a Moodle Lesson. Have students collaborate on project work online using a Moodle Wiki. Create an online multimedia dictionary using a Moodle Glossary. Convert quick-fire quizzes and straw polls to Moodle using the Choice activity.
Chapter 9: Putting It All together This is when we bring all of our work in the previous eight chapters together. We will look at structuring an online course to support face-to-face teaching (so-called "blended" learning), how to convert group working to Moodle (including how to manage groups online), and how to check and monitor student progress. And to make sure we don't lose all of our hard work, we learn how to back up and restore courses.
Moodle is accessed via the Internet so you will need a computer with Internet access. This book is aimed at educators—not Moodle administrators—so you will need access to a Moodle. This means having the web address (URL) of a Moodle on which you have been registered. To log into your Moodle, you will need a username and password. If you need more information on Moodle administration then check out Moodle Administration, also available from Packt Publishing (see http://www.packtpub.com/moodle-administration-guide/book/ for details).
If you are a teacher, lecturer, or trainer faced with using Moodle for the first time and you want to convert your teaching materials to Moodle quickly, effectively, and with the minimum of fuss then this book is for you. You may have toyed with the idea of using Moodle but you are not sure how to begin converting your face-to-face teaching online. If so, this book will show you how to create engaging and entertaining online courses. You may need to support your face-to-face teaching with online activities, including assignments and tests. In this book, we get you started with blended learning.
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.
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
Practical, hands-on actions and instructions are introduced with a Time For Action heading, and use numbered steps to make it easier to read:
1. Action 1
2. Action 2
3. Action 3
When instructions need some extra explanation so that they make sense, they are followed with...
... which explains how the task or instructions you just completed work, so that you learn how Moodle works as you complete useful activities.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
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