Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Math

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Math

Overview of this book

Moodle is a popular e-learning platform that is making inroads into all areas of the curriculum. Using moodle helps you to develop exciting, interactive, and engaging online math courses. But teaching math requires use of graphs, equations, special notation, and other features that are not built into Moodle. Using Moodle to teach Mathematics presents its own challenges. The book will show you how to set-up a Moodle course to support the teaching of mathematics. It will also help you to carefully explore the Moodle plugins that allow the handling of equations and enable other frequently used mathematical activities. Taking a practical approach, this book will introduce you to the concepts of converting mathematics teaching over to Moodle. It provides you with everything you need to include mathematical notation, graphs, images, video, audio, and more in your Moodle courses. By following the practical examples in this book, you can create feature-rich quizzes that are automatically marked, use tools to monitor student progress, employ modules and plugins allowing students to explore mathematical concepts. You'll also learn the integration of presentations, interactive math elements, SCORM, and Flash objects into Moodle. It will take you through these elements in detail and help you learn how to create, edit, and integrate them into Moodle. Soon you will develop your own exciting, interactive, and engaging online math courses with ease.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Math
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
Preface

Advanced notation using the TeX filter


As we have seen, turning on the TeX filter means we can write mathematical notation in TeX and have Moodle convert this into formal mathematical notation for us. For example, x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a} is converted into this:

Notice how we don't have to worry about the arrangement of the symbols; the filter will do all of that for us.

Turning on the TeX filter

Before we use the TeX filter, we need to make sure it is switched on. That means logging in to Moodle with administrator privileges. If you don't have these privileges then at this stage you'll need to hand this book over to your friendly Moodle admin:

  1. 1. Make sure you are logged into Moodle as an administrator. Find the Site Administration block on the site's front page. Select Modules | Filters | Manage filters:

  2. 2. On the Manage filters page, find the TeX filter in the list of installed filters, and make sure it's enabled:

  3. 3. If it isn't enabled, then the eye will be closed. Poke the eye...