Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Teaching Special Education Children (5-10): Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Teaching Special Education Children (5-10): Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Moodle is a free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. But what does it have to offer to the children with special educational needs who want a fun, inspiring, interactive, and informative learning experience? Moodle 1.9 empowers educators achieve all these set of rich experiences with many related activities - this book shows you how! This book offers solutions to developing interactive courses and therapies for children with special education needs who are between the age group of 5 to 10 years. It teaches to combine Moodle 1.9 with the opportunities offered by Web 2.0, free and commercial software, and general purpose hardware devices. This book will guide the reader step-by-step in using many different tools to create exciting experiences to offer great motivation to children with special educational needs, considering the opportunities for online education. This book will help the reader to build interactive and rich online content oriented to children with special educational needs using different techniques and open source tools. It teaches you to create exercises as if you were playing with children at the school, the zoo, the beach, the supermarket, a birthday party, an aquarium, a farm, at the shopping, a circus or at home. You will be able to work with drawings, music, sounds, videos, photographs and text, and you will combine all these pieces into nice experiences for children who need to find extra motivation to improve their learning skills. Besides, it will teach you to take advantage of general purpose, non-expensive hardware like gamepads, joysticks, digital pens also known as pen-sketches, multi-touch screens, netbooks and touchpads. The usage of some of these hardware devices combined with visually rich activities usually offer children an extra motivation to focus on solving the exercises.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 for Teaching Special Education Children (5-10 Year Olds)
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface

Acknowledgement

While writing this book, I was fortunate enough to work with an excellent team at Packt Publishing Ltd, whose contributions vastly improved the presentation of this book. Sarah Cullington helped me to transform the idea in the final book and to shape this Beginner's Guide. Zainab Bagasrawala helped me to follow an organized schedule. Mehul Shetty provided many sensible suggestions regarding the text, the format, and the flow. The reader will notice his great work. Aaron Rosario made sure that all the exercises were accurate and added great value to the final drafts.

I would like to thank my reviewer, Mary Cooch (http://www.moodleblog.org), for her thorough reviews and insightful comments. I was able to incorporate some of the knowledge and wisdom she has gained in her many years of experience with Moodle, Hot Potatoes, and Virtual Learning Environments. The exercises and the pictures include Mary's great feedback.

Special thanks go to my husband, Gaston Hillar, who a few years ago, suggested that I use new technologies in therapeutic environments, and motivated me to work on this new project. Moreover, I would like to thank my sister-in-law, Silvina Hillar, who also helped with her teaching expertise; my son Kevin and my nephew Nicolas, who enrich my life with their affection; my friends, and my father-in-law.