What this book covers

Chapter 1 —Setting Up a Basic Moodle Site for Design Technology (DT), provides you with an overview of how Moodle can be used as a system to help teaching and learning of Design Technology subject matter. You will learn how to construct and the basic categories in order to organize your courses, as well as the design and set-up of the courses themselves. You will then learn how to create resources for your students learning and add interactive activities to challenge and excite your students. Finally, you will be shown how to track and assess your students' learning through the Gradebook incorporated into Moodle.

Chapter 2 —Organizing Information using Moodle Modules, introduces you to the interactive tools in Moodle called Modules. Two of these modules, the Database and Questionnaire, are used to illustrate how students can be encouraged to enhance their understanding and knowledge. You will learn how to create and structure a database for students to gather and analyze the materials and components they will use for their design and construction. You will then work through a basic example of how to use the Questionnaire module to allow students to gather a wide variety of opinions from potential customers in order to make their final products more suited to their target audience. Since this chapter introduces third party add-on modules, such as the Questionnaire module, you will be guided through the process of adding extra modules to your Moodle site.

Chapter 3 —Encouraging Reflective Practices using Forums and Blogs, tells you, through worked examples, how best to encourage and support reflective practices in your students with the use of Blogs, Forums, Galleries and Personal Learning Plans. You will learn how to enable and configure Blogs for your courses and how to use these tools to guide students in their development of ideas and practices. You will then be guided through the creation and usage of Forums in order to test students in their ability to role play and deal with simulations of working in their chosen discipline of Design Technology. You will be shown how to set up a Gallery to allow students to post their on-going work details, such as images taken during the construction of their projects. Finally, you will be introduced to a Personal Learning module which allows you and your students to set and evaluate targets and personal goals. All of these tools collectively will help your students reflect on their work and allow you to better guide them in their ideas and practices.

Chapter 4 —Exploring Design Portfolios, introduces Electronic Portfolios (e-portfolios) and shows you how best to use the variety of available e-portfolios to support your student's learning. You will be shown how to set up the Exabis e-portfolio to allow students to store and organize their own work and be able to share it with their peers or external examiners. You will then be shown how to configure and use the Open University e-portfolio MyStuff, which allows students more flexibility in building up digital resources in order to show their complete understanding of Design Technology with their own digital artifacts. Finally, you will be guided in the process of using Mahara to allow students to build up digital views of their material for assignments and assessment.

Chapter 5 —Testing Students' Knowledge using Moodle Modules, explains how best to support and reinforce your students' understanding of some of the disparate knowledge they need to engage in their courses. You will be shown how to set up the Glossary module to allow students to construct and maintain their own dictionary of key terms used in their courses. You will also be shown through a worked example how the linking capability of the Glossary module can be used to reinforce key ideas throughout your course. You will be shown how to incorporate the Mind Mapping module into your course to allow students to brainstorm some of their project ideas. Finally, you will be shown how to use the Quiz module to construct various formal and informal tests to better gauge your students' level of understanding of the courses.

Chapter 6 —Helping your Students Gather Data about their Potential Markets, explores in more detail the Questionnaire module introduced briefly in Chapter 2 and shows how it can be used effectively to support detailed market analysis for students. You will be shown how the data can be gathered and analyzed in order for students to make more informed choices about their projects and how markets might react to their designs. You will then be guided through the implementation of the Feedback module to allow students to get an impression for their potential customers about the suitability of their design ideas. Finally, you will be shown how to use interactive on-line meeting tools like DimDim to allow students to discuss their ideas with a wider audience, such as representatives from local manufacturing companies.

Chapter 7 —Adding Multimedia Resources to your Moodle Site, provides you with an introduction to e-learning materials and resources such as the Lesson module and SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Module) packages, as well as on-line materials provided by governments. You will be shown how to set-up and use the Lesson module to create a self-contained lesson for assessing and supporting your students' learning. You will be shown how to enable on-line repositories of SCORM material to provide your students with more media rich materials and examples. Finally, you will be shown how to create your own multi-media rich SCORM material with free web-based tools such as MyUdutu.

Chapter 8 —Assessing Student Progress, shows you how to assess your students' progress through creating assignments to monitor their development. You will be shown how to create a variety of different assignments for different purposes such as multiple file uploads for complex projects involving documents, images and video files. You will be shown how to grade and scale these assignments and how to add quality feedback to make sure the students reach their full potential in your courses. You will also be shown how to add enhancements to the course such as progress indicators and blocks to show you how much marking you have left to complete.

Chapter 9 —Tracking Progress with the Gradebook, explains in detail how to use the Gradebook in Moodle to fully assess your students' progress and achievement. You will be shown how to configure and use the Gradebook to assess learning in an informal way through homework assignments and a formal way through examinations. You will also be shown how to use the Gradebook to set and mark outcomes such as competence in literacy and numeracy. You will be shown how to organize the Gradebook to display different categories of grades such as coursework and examination work, and how to tally these for a final mark. Finally, you will be shown how the Gradebook can be customized to display the reports of grades required for your specific courses.