Book Image

Moodle 2.5 Multimedia - Second Edition

By : Joao Pedro Soares Fernandes
Book Image

Moodle 2.5 Multimedia - Second Edition

By: Joao Pedro Soares Fernandes

Overview of this book

Multimedia is a very old human endeavor. It has taken mankind almost 30,000 years since painting on cave walls to get a combination of text, image, sound, and video all working in the same medium, that is, in motion pictures. Finally, after thousands of years of human history, we can all (not just an elite few) create multimedia easily using Moodle. Moodle was built around an idea of learning that happens when a group of people construct things for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings. A tutorial-based guide, with clear illustrations and examples of how to create, convert and add multimedia to Moodle using a range of free e-learning software tools and web applications. This book follows the design of resources and activities for the course “Music for everyday life”. The tasks presented are quick and easy to do for teachers and trainers with busy schedules. Giving readers an insight into the creation and integration of multimedia in Moodle courses. Starting with images you will learn to create photo collages, screenshots and comic strips. Then you will discover audio and how to extract audio from CDs to create a soundtrack for a movie and a podcast. Later, you will use video to produce a trailer for a movie, photo slideshows, online TVs and screencasts. Following that, you will develop an understanding of interactive elements and web communication, such as online maps, interactive timelines or web meetings. Finally, you will look at multimedia quizzes and assessment of multimedia assignments, ending with general issues on copyright, licensing and safety. A focus of the book is to show readers that using multimedia is not just about improving instruction, but also improving the ways in which students can can now create multimedia easily, and share it without great effort.. To make this easier, many of the moodle tutorials in the book will be based on activities designed for students to create, discuss and assess each other's multimedia works.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Moodle 2.5 Multimedia
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.packtpub.com
Preface
Index

Finding free videos online


Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive (for example, http://www.archive.org/details/moviesandfilms) are usually a safe option for downloading and using videos in our video projects. Although these are very useful, they are not the only services available; we can find many others with particular interest to teachers and trainers. YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) is well known and has lots of useful stuff, but there are many others.

However, before we check reference websites where we can find interesting videos and embed them in our courses, let's first have a look at the basics of video formats.

The basics of video formats

With video, things start to get complicated concerning formats. Rates, bitrates, codecs, formats, sizes, frame rates, and on top of this, all the audio varieties can overwhelm us. We should know some of these formats:

  • AVI with Xvid or DivX: AVI is a common video format using the Xvid or DivX codecs, giving a good quality/file size for movies...