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 much time to recreating all their lessons from scratch.
This book provides the quickest way for teachers and trainers to get up and running with Moodle, by turning their familiar teaching materials into a Moodle e-learning course.
This book shows how to bring your existing notes, worksheets, resources, and lesson plans into Moodle quickly and easily. Instead of exploring every feature of Moodle, the book focuses on getting you started immediately—you will be turning your existing materials into Moodle courses right from the start.
The book begins by showing 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, into Moodle. You will learn how to format them in a way that means students will be able to read them, and use plenty of shortcuts along the way to speed up the process.
By the end of Chapter 3, Adding Documents and Handouts, you will already have a Moodle course that contains your learning resources in a presentable way. But the book doesn'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 video.
Throughout the book, the 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, covers why Moodle was created and how it was developed, how to log on and log out of Moodle, exploring the Moodle interface and learning some Moodle terminology, and configuring your user profiles.
Chapter 2, Setting up your Courses, covers configuring your Moodle course.
Chapter 3, Adding Documents and Handouts, covers getting your content online and ready to let your students start working with it.
Chapter 4, Sound and Vision—Including Multimedia Content, covers how to make your courses more engaging and entertaining with sound, video, and multimedia.
Chapter 5, Moodle Makeover, will take a look at tips and techniques that'll take your courses from looking good to looking great.
Chapter 6, Managing Student Work, covers managing student work online.
Chapter 7, Communicating Online, covers how to discuss work with students online.
Chapter 8, Enhancing your Teaching, covers how to enhance your teaching using other Moodle activities, such as quizzes and wikis.
Chapter 9, Putting it All Together, brings everything together and looks at possible ways of structuring a course that has been converted to Moodle.
This book is for teachers, tutors, and lecturers who already have a large body of teaching material and want to use Moodle to enhance their course, rather than developing brand new ones. You won't need experience with Moodle, but will need teacher-access to a ready-installed Moodle site.
Teachers with some experience of Moodle, who want to focus on incorporating existing course materials will also find this book very useful.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
Action 1
Action 2
Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
These are short multiple choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
These set practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also 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: "I'm going to specify MCC-BC."
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: "Scroll down to the bottom of the page and press the Save changes button".
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"Handing in Work through Moodle" is a bonus chapter along with this book and is available for free download from http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/handling_in_work_through_moodle.pdf.
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