Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds: Beginner's Guide

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! This book 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. 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. Its aim is to give you some hints and advice on how to get your Moodle courses up and running with useful content that your students will actually want to go and learn from on a regular basis. We will assume that you have an installation of Moodle managed by somebody else, so you are responsible only for creating and delivering course content. Throughout the book we will be building a course from scratch, adaptable for ages 7 to 14 on Rivers and Flooding It could be any topic, as Moodle lends itself to all subjects and ages.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds
Credits
About the author
About the reviewers
Preface

Making changes on the course page


If you point your cursor at one of the sections in the middle and start typing—nothing happens! We can't actually add any text or make any alterations until we have clicked on the Turn editing on button which is on the upper right of the screen. (You can also get to it by clicking on the Administration block) When you do, everything looks different, as shown in the next screenshot. Don't panic!

A lot of symbols (icons) have appeared. These symbols have different roles in helping us to edit the course. They help us to add content, delete content, or alter what's already there. Let's take a tour of the blocks, and use this as a way to understand these icons.

Getting the best out of the side blocks

Every course in Moodle has a central work area and a selection of blocks on either side. These blocks serve various purposes such as: telling you the latest news, letting you know who's online, displaying quiz results, and so on. Shortly, we'll have a look at the blocks available, and I'll give you my thoughts on how useful they might be. Some schools may decide for you which blocks you must have, and the blocks that should be made sticky throughout Moodle. If you're allowed to have your own blocks, then the next section will show you how you can move them around and take away the ones that you don't really need. First, let’s take a closer look at the Activities block. The following screenshot shows the Activities block, although the icons shown are available in every block.