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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In today's world, multimedia can provide a more engaging experience for learners. You can embed your own audio, link to pages off-site, or pull a YouTube video into your course. You can use feature-rich quizzes that allow you to assess your students, or provide them with tools and feedback to test their own knowledge. All these require standard procedures and cutting-edge tools.
Selecting tools to make multimedia integration in Moodle faster, simpler, and more precise is not child's play.
This book provides you with everything you need to include sound, video, animation, and more in your Moodle courses. You'll develop Moodle courses that you are proud of, and that your students enjoy.
This book covers integration of multimedia into Moodle, covering major multimedia elements such as images, audio, and video. It will take you through these elements in detail where you will learn how to create, edit, and integrate these elements into Moodle. The book is written around the design of an online course called "Music for Everyday Life" using Moodle, where teachers and students create, share, and discuss multimedia elements. You will also learn how to use Web 2.0 tools to create images, audio, and video and then we will take a look at the web applications that allow easy creation, collaboration, and sharing of multimedia elements. Finally, you will learn how to interact with students in real-time using a particular online phone service and a desktop sharing application.
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Seitenzahl: 259
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009
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Table of Contents
Moodle 1.9 Multimedia
João Pedro Soares Fernandes
Moodle 1.9 Multimedia
Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book, by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: May 2009
Production Reference: 1150509
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847195-90-6
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Parag Kadam (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
João Pedro Soares Fernandes
Reviewers
David Horat
Ian Wild
Laia Subirats
Acquisition Editor
David Barnes
Development Editor
Siddharth Mangarole
Technical Editor
Rakesh Shejwal
Indexer
Rekha Nair
Production Editorial Manager
Abhijeet Deobhakta
Editorial Team Leader
Akshara Aware
Project Team Leader
Lata Basantani
Project Coordinator
Neelkanth Mehta
Proofreader
Dirk Manuel
Production Coordinator
Dolly Dasilva
Cover Work
Dolly Dasilva
About the author
João Fernandes is a science teacher from Portugal, who has been working with Moodle since 2004. He has been involved in several Moodle initiatives at school, university, and government levels, as a teacher, trainer, course and content developer, manager, consultant, designer, and researcher.
João is currently living in London, pursuing a PhD in Science Education at King's College London and working on several projects on ICT in education. His main interests include education, multimedia, the Web, participation, democracy, and human development.
In a single year, he can be seen in several corners of the earth, either working, visiting schools, hiking, or taking photos in mostly non-touristic venues. He also loves music, old cheap cars, cooking, and spending his time with nature.
I would like to thank my family, friends, colleagues, and students for their support through the sometimes-painful process of writing a book while you work, study, and try to have a life. Thanks for all of the ideas and comments, and thanks for the shared experiences that inspired many of the activities in this book.
And thanks to all of the free software and free content communities for making great tools and resources available to everyone, and not just to some elite people. Whatever we do, is not just an achievement of one, but of many. This one is ours.
About the reviewers
David Horat was raised in Gran Canaria, a Spanish island near the African coast. There, he completed his M.Sc. in Computer Engineering at the University of Las Palmas de G.C. Encouraged by his colleagues and friends, he decided to go abroad. He spent six months on an Erasmus scholarship in the German University FH Nord Akademie, where he developed an eLearning platform based on Moodle and other tools. He later worked on his Master thesis, which focuses on accessibility and usability in web applications, but specifically as applied to Moodle.
David is currently working as a Software Engineer in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) specializing in grid technologies. He has also worked at Ericsson as a specialist on communication protocols. Among other things, he has participated as a Moodle mentor in the Google Summer of Code program for two years, contributing to the community in accessibility and usability projects.
Ian Wild is the co-founder of Heavy Horse Ltd. (http://heavy-horse.co.uk), a company specializing in information and communication technology, especially in the context of education. He lives in rural Worcestershire with his wife Karen and three children, Matthew, Lian, and Ethan.
Ian's career has always focused primarily on communication and education. Fifteen years spent in private industry, designing communication systems software, eventually saw Ian specialize in the design and development of access and learning aids for blind, visually impaired, dyslexic, and dyscalculic computer users—whilst also working part-time as a math and science tutor.
Teaching only part-time meant not spending as much time with his students as he would have liked. This, coupled with his background in learning and communication technology, seeded his interest in virtual learning environments.
Ian is author of the popular book Moodle Course Conversion: Beginner's Guide, also published by Packt.
Laia Subirats completed his M.S. degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Pompeu Fabra University in M.Sc 2008. During the last two years of her degree, she worked in several companies such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Telefonica R&D, and the Catalonian Supercomputing Centre. Thanks to the Google Summer of Code she worked in preventing, detecting, and solving Moodle usability problems. Moreover, she was a speaker for the Gradebook module in MoodleMoot 2008. Currently, she is studying a Research Master at the Telematics in Technical University of Catalonia, also in Barcelona, granted by the "la Caixa" scholarship program. She is especially interested in encouraging female teenagers into technical degrees.
I would like to thank my parents, grandparents, and aunts for their unconditional support. And special thanks to David for being with me in difficult moments as well as in the happy ones, of which there have been many more.
Preface
This book provides you with everything you need to include pictures, sound, video, animations, and more in your Moodle courses. You'll develop Moodle courses that you are proud of, and that your students enjoy.
This book was written around the design of an online course called Music for an everyday life using Moodle, where teachers and students will be required to create, share, and discuss multimedia elements. Music was selected as a starting theme because besides being fun and horizontal to all cultures, it's a subject that can easily gather contributions from areas such as Science (for example, Waves and Sound), Geography (with instruments from around the world such as the Ukelele), Languages (music in itself is a language), History (from medieval music to jazz), or even Social Sciences (for example, the law around creative works). It was not made for musicians in particular, and one of its main challenges was to reach different educators from different subjects. Music was the way to get these perspectives working all together.
The tasks presented are easy to do and consume as little time as possible, for teachers and trainers with busy schedules. We will use multi-platform, free software, and Web 2.0 tools to achieve this, and it was kept in mind that using multimedia is not just about improving instructions, but also to improve the ways in which students can construct. So a lot of the examples in the book will be based on activities designed for students in which they will be required to create, discuss and assess each other's multimedia works.
What this book covers
Chapter 1 takes a look at the evolution of multimedia—its advantages and uses in teaching and learning, and how these can be used with Moodle. We will also see some of the requirements for using multimedia in Moodle, and configure it accordingly, and make three simple experiments in a forum with pictures, sound, and video, to see if everything is working as expected in integrating these in Moodle.
We will finally consider the basic knowledge, equipment, and software required to start creating this course, Music for an everyday life, which will gather contributions from History, Geography, Social Sciences, Science, and other fields of human knowledge.
In Chapter 2, we will start by seeing how to find free pictures online to add to our course materials (and assignments, from a students' perspective) in services such as Flickr and Wikimedia Commons.
We will then have a look at different ways of inserting images in Moodle, especially using the HTML editor image upload function. We then start using GIMP for main image editing tasks, such as cropping, resizing, capturing (together with some photography concepts), color correction, photo collage, and saving in different formats. Some issues regarding images in Moodle, such as file formats and appropriate sizes, will also be discussed, and how to use the Print screen function and Jing to collect screenshots. Strip generator will be used to easily create comic strips. We will also learn how to export PowerPoint presentations to images, adding them to a Moodle lesson, or as an alternative publishing these presentations in Slideshare. We will conclude this chapter by looking at ways to create photo slideshows using Slide.
In Chapter 3 we will focus on tasks for the Moodle integration of sound and music elements. The resources created will make information available in improved ways to students and will also get them to create audio artifacts, such as slices, remixes, voice recordings, text-to-speech, and podcasts.
We will use several tools to achieve this, especially Audacity, VLC media player, Voki, Podomatic, and Imeem and we will also see where to find free sounds and music on the Web.
In Chapter 4 we will focus on video production and editing, looking at different ways of using these in Moodle. We will start by looking at places to find free video online, followed by ways of downloading videos from YouTube and TeacherTube, concluding with the basics of video formats. We will then look at ways of extracting DVD selections for later editing, and how to create photo stories, screencasts, an online TV station, and a stop motion video.
Chapter 5 focuses on activities that we can do with Moodle and some Web 2.0 tools. The objective is to show how this integration can open several possibilities for teaching and learning, providing free applications where teachers and students can create their own multimedia works and then embed them in Moodle for instruction, discussion, or assessment. We will create interactive floor plans, timelines, maps, online presentations, gadgets to represent data and mind maps. We will also see the possibilities of having collaboration in the construction of these multimedia works, as most Web 2.0 tools have as a standard the option to create with others a collective work.
In Chapter 6, we will learn to integrate multimedia elements in quizzes, lessons, and assignments. We will also use applications that allow us to create interactive exercises and games that can be easily assessed from and integrated into Moodle, such as crosswords, puzzles, matching pairs among others. We will look at rubrics as ways of assessing multimedia works in a quick and easy way.
Chapter 7 teaches us how to interact with students in Moodle courses in real-time by using an online chat service and a Web meeting tool. This will allow text, audio, and video chat and also whiteboard, presentation, and desktop sharing.
Chapter 8 deals with some common issues on multimedia in Moodle related to copyright, e-safety, referencing sources, and other similar issues. We will conclude with some possible modules and plug-ins to install in Moodle to expand its possibilities and some criteria for selecting Web 2.0 services for our classes.
Who this book is for
The book is primarily aimed at teachers and trainers who run professional courses and have experience in the use of Moodle. At the same time, it is not necessary to have an advanced technical background to create multimedia elements, as the tasks will be simple and as little time consuming as possible, relevant to everyday use.
Conventions
In this book, you will 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.
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 our text like this: "In this case, we just need to provide the URL and click on the Download button".
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Chapter 1. Getting Ready for Multimedia in Moodle
Multimedia is a very old human endeavor. And curiously, it all started with images, more than 30,000 years ago, painted by pre-historic humans on cave walls. The Chauvet caves and Lascaux caves, in France have the oldest paintings known to man (refer to the following image).
Source: Sacred destinations (2009).Lascaux cave painting. Retrieved April 14, 2009, from http://www.sacred-destinations.com/france/lascaux-caves.htm (Public domain)
This was the first technology invented to express and capture not only the world we experienced through our senses, but also our imagination and creativity in a medium that could be shared with others.
When compared to these paintings, written text is quite recent, and it marks the beginning of History, more than 9,000 years ago (that's the reason we call the period before it the pre-History). After stone, papyrus was used in ancient Egypt, then parchment, and later paper, invented in China and brought to Europe in the 12th Century.
The 19th Century saw great developments in multimedia. From photography to motion pictures, from mass production of paper to the new process of printing images and text on the same page, all of it was invented during this time.
Ironically, it took mankind almost all of the 30,000 years since the paintings on cave walls to get a combination of text, image, sound, and video, all working in the same medium. The first motion pictures articulating all of these elements were first watched in the 1920's, with soundtracks, subtitles, and of course, pictures—still or moving.
The real revolution started with the advent of computers and the Internet, and later on the World Wide Web in the beginning of the 90's, and economically-accessible technology for the masses. And finally, after thousands of years of human history, we (not just an elite few) can now create multimedia easily, and share it without great effort. In a way, it's a new era for human imagination, creativity, and expression.
This book is about exploring these new possibilities for not only we teachers and educators, but also we students and learners, for teaching, learning, and imagining in new ways, in our everyday life. And of course, we will be using Moodle for all of this.
By the end of this chapter we will:
Multimedia in oodle was built around an idea ofMoodle
M learning that happens when a group of people constructs things for one another, creating, collaboratively, a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings.
Moodle makes available many resources (web pages, books, files, links, and so on) and activities (forums, assignments, quizzes, lessons, databases, glossaries, and so on) to support teaching and learning, but what can distinguish working with these from paper and pencil work is the way we explore the possibilities of computers and the Web to articulate multimedia elements with text. Creating these multimedia elements, a very powerful concept too, is not possible using Moodle (it is not in its scope either), so when I am talking about using multimedia in Moodle I am mainly referring to the creation of multimedia using other kind of tools, particularly by students, and guided and later integrated, discussed, and assessed through Moodle.
Using multimedia in this way can provide more opportunities, to a group of teachers and students, for the construction of, in this case, multimedia artifacts. We will try to use multimedia not only as a product for better delivery, but also to improve the ways in which students can construct.
It is usually said that multimedia can be beneficial for learning, as it can approach diverse learning styles, add interactivity and learner control, and reduce the time required to learn or extend the information presented through different channels. When we talk about multimedia elements, we are talking about content; however, I would say that pedagogy is even more important. That is why we should also value diverse classroom practices around multimedia rather than just using it exclusively for delivery.
I would like to quote the words of Seymour Papert (1993):
Across the world children have entered a passionate and enduring love affair with the computer
Note
Papert, Seymour: Preface to The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. Retrieved 14 August, 2008, from http://www.papert.org/articles/ChildrensMachine.html
I believe that this also applies to multimedia—using multimedia in Moodle is a way of engaging our students and making subjects more interesting to them.
This book was written around the design of an online course called Music for an everyday life using Moodle, which is available at http://www.musicforaneverydaylife.com. This course is open to everyone (no enrolment key is needed; it has a guest access), so you can share it with colleagues as it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. This gives you a lot of freedom in using and remixing the course's content in your own course.
You might ask, why music? Music, besides being fun and horizontal to all cultures, is a subject that can easily gather contributions from areas such as Science (for example, Waves and Sound), Geography (with instruments from around the world, such as the Ukelele), Languages (music in itself is a language), World History (from medieval music to jazz), or even Social Sciences (the law around creative works). This book was not made for musicians in particular, and one of its main challenges was to reach different educators from different subjects. Music is simply the way to get all of these perspectives working together.
About the course
The main goal of the course is to develop a basic music literacy that can be used in the daily life of teenagers and adults.
I'm not a professional musician (barely a talented amateur) so I'm not expecting the course, Music for an everyday life, to be THE online reference in music education. Music was chosen as the main subject of the course so that it could be meaningful to as many people as possible. As it permeates all areas of life, I have tried to create a curriculum that reflected this, approaching music from a broader perspective, and not just basic music theory or instrument playing.
When designing this course, I tried to combine my experience in teaching (mainly science and ICT in education), and my time as a student in a Jazz school in Portugal, and all that teenage period that some of us go through, when we want to be stars, live somewhere between a studio and a stage, sell CDs, and be famous. Some of my friends who accompanied me during this period are now professional musicians (one has just graduated in the conservatory of Amsterdam), others changed paths despite their talent, and are now business men or designers. I became a science teacher; the studio times are gone, and I really like what I do now, but music will always be a part of my life, and this course was an opportunity to remember and share it with others.
Course structure
The course, Music for an everyday life, will be organized around 10 modules (adding one pre-session for preparation and one post-session for follow up), corresponding to three hours of work each, for a total of 30 hours. The course can be used either in distance education or combined with regular classes, what we call blended-learning or b-learning.
Each of the course's 10 modules will have a standard structure, starting with:
For each module, we will develop multimedia content such as images, audio, video, and interactive content, so in total we will create some dozens of multimedia artifacts that are hopefully relevant, are easy-to-do, and are as little time consuming as possible to develop, for us teachers and trainers with busy schedules.
Course content
Using multimedia for delivery, and building our own teaching material, can be time-consuming, and as we know, being a teacher or a trainer is time consuming just by itself, without the need for any extra work load. This book will focus on simple multimedia elements that you can create without a huge effort, for your everyday life as a teacher or a trainer. Even if you are an enthusiast of digital technologies, keep this in mind—leave time and space for your students or trainees to explore the tools and create multimedia elements. Don't put all of the weight on your side. Better learning is not necessarily a consequence of instruction, so the focus of the course will be on giving the learner better opportunities to create and share multimedia artifacts, and to dialogue about and reflect on these constructions with others.
Nowadays, you can find a lot of free content on the Web that can be used for educational purposes without limitations. I would like to thank the authors of this content for their contribution to this culture of sharing in which we are now living. The same goes for the communities of free software, and the companies that provide software for free, for opening opportunities to many people, on which this book and the course are built upon. Building on their work is like "standing on the shoulders of giants".
The course modules will be organized around the following themes:
Pre-requisites
Some assumptions are made as the pre-requisites both for this book and for the course. These have to deal with the knowledge, hardware, and software that will be required to complete all of the proposed tasks.
Knowledge
The course will be for music beginners who probably have an instrument, such as a piano or guitar (this is not a necessity, as we will be also creating music using a computer), and who have an intermediate knowledge of how to use a computer, the Web, and Moodle from a student's perspective. This means that students are expected to already know how to manage files and folders, use a digital camera, and download photos and videos to a computer, how to install, uninstall, open, and close programs, and so on.
