After going through these steps, it's a good time to try it out to see if everything is working. Let's start with three simple tasks, involving an image, a sound, and a video on a forum, respectively.
Go to the Flickr Creative Commons (CC) licensed content at http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0 and search for a photo under an Attribution license (when an image is termed as CC attribution it means that we can use these images without many restrictions, except for citing the author. We will have a look at copyright issues in Chapter 8, Common Multimedia Issues in Moodle).
On the results page, choose an image. Next, right-click on the image (if you are a Mac user and have a one-button mouse, click on it while pressing the control key on the keyboard), choose a size and save the picture to your computer.
Finally, upload the image as an attachment to a new forum post, citing the source.
You should be able to see a screenshot similar to the following:
In this case, Moodle has automatically inserted the image for us. It has a width that will fit well in the screen. Sometimes, when the image has a width above say, 800 or 1024 pixels (depending on the monitor on which it is displayed), we will have to resize it, preferably before we upload it to Moodle. You don't have to worry about that for now.
Select a song from the WIRED CD (http://creativecommons.org/wired).
Download it to your computer, again by right-clicking on the link to the music (or by pressing the control key plus the mouse button for Mac users), and saving the target of the link to your computer.
Write a forum post in Moodle citing the source of the music (never forget the sources—the license of the music of this CD allows noncommercial sharing).
Upload the sound file as an attachment on the forum post.
If everything works as expected you should see a screen similar to the following:
Moodle's multimedia plugin is automatically inserting a flash player for our MP3 file. The multimedia plugin processes the page, looking for links to multimedia files, and when it finds one, it tries to insert a player.
Note
In the case of MP3 files, we should ensure that we have the flash player plugin installed on our browser. We can go to http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ and check this (if we don't have the flash player installed, that's not a problem). The flash player allows the playing of multimedia content, such as audio, video, or animations inside browsers.
We should also have the necessary players for file formats such as MPEG-4 (the *.mp4 files) and Windows Media Video (the *.wmv files) installed on our computer and working inside our browser; for example, a QuickTime player, available at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/.
There are many uses of audio in other Moodle activities (such as the quiz or the assignment), but we'll just focus on the forum for now. We could do the following:
Doing a role-play activity in which each student plays a character
Asking for a poetry selection and declamation by students
Starting a collaborative and iterative composition of a musical theme, where each new post builds on the one before
Generating a podcast through the conversion of the forum's RSS feed
Hosting a Q&A session between the teacher, invited experts, and students
Using a text-to-speech tool to create fictitious dialogs
Doing some ear training exercises
Doing a show-and-tell exercise
Go to TED (http://www.ted.com/) and search for a video. In the results page, choose one and click on it.
Click on the Embed button below the video.
Copy the code in the form next to Embed this video.
Open a new forum post and write something about it. Do not forget to mention the source of the video.
In the HTML editor, use the Enter key after the source and then click on the HTML button to switch to HTML mode.
Paste the code after the HTML tag
<p>(which corresponds to a paragraph in the text), as shown in the following screenshot:
Post your message, and the result will look similar to the following screenshot:
This embed procedure is very helpful, and you should keep these very simple steps in mind:
In a post, the size of the video (width and height) will fit well in the screen. However, if we were embedding it in a Moodle block, we would have to change something in the code used as is. We will leave that for later, when it's needed.
Using forums with videos is a great way to start a discussion, and it can also be used to do the following:
Commenting on a video excerpt
Creating a collaborative video selection
Broadcasting a live event
Posting a video to add subtitles and comments
Posting a silent video for students to submit a soundtrack
Posting a video tutorial capturing procedures for a software application
We have just tried three simple examples of using content that was not made by us. Creating our own multimedia content is another story; however, nowadays it can be quite easy, with the price of equipment going down, software interfaces getting simpler to use, and a wide variety of free software being available for multimedia editing. We now don't have any excuses for not using it, except for a lack of time. The subsequent chapters in this book will deal with this multimedia production, explaining and showing how to create these resources for delivery and active learning, not just as products but also as activities for your students to participate in.
To give you just a flavor of what the course will be, here is a list of some examples that will be developed either for the course by the teachers, or during the course activities by the students:
Adding short audio clips and voice recordings to forums
Producing video tutorials explaining some tasks in music software and exploring some websites
Adding a soundtrack and remixing a video
Creating an interactive timeline of the history of music
Creating a collective world map with multimedia placemarks of world instruments
Designing a music studio floor plan
Drawing a cartoon strip about a scene in the life of a musician
Creating a collaborative multimedia music styles glossary
Creating interactive diagrams and charts
Using multimedia Moodle quizzes, lessons, and assignments with multimedia, and many other such exciting activities