Create courses and therapies for children with special educational needs using Moodle for effective e-learning

• Focus on building rich and interactive activities to create least restrictive environments, your students will want to go on day after day
• Learn to use netbooks, gamepads, touch screens, microphones, and Webcams to motivate children
• Take advantage of all the new possibilities offered by the creation of rich User Experiences in your activities
• Ideal for teachers who are new to Moodle as it is easy to follow and abundantly illustrated with screenshots of the solutions you'll build

In Detail

Moodle is a free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. But what does it have to offer to the children with special educational needs who want a fun, inspiring, interactive, and informative learning experience? Moodle 1.9 empowers educators achieve all these set of rich experiences with many related activities - this book shows you how!

This book offers solutions to developing interactive courses and therapies for children with special education needs who are between the age group of 5 to 10 years. It teaches to combine Moodle 1.9 with the opportunities offered by Web 2.0, free and commercial software, and general purpose hardware devices. This book will guide the reader step-by-step in using many different tools to create exciting experiences to offer great motivation to children with special educational needs, considering the opportunities for online education.

This book will help the reader to build interactive and rich online content oriented to children with special educational needs using different techniques and open source tools. It teaches you to create exercises as if you were playing with children at the school, the zoo, the beach, the supermarket, a birthday party, an aquarium, a farm, at the shopping, a circus or at home. You will be able to work with drawings, music, sounds, videos, photographs and text, and you will combine all these pieces into nice experiences for children who need to find extra motivation to improve their learning skills.

Besides, it will teach you to take advantage of general purpose, non-expensive hardware like gamepads, joysticks, digital pens also known as pen-sketches, multi-touch screens, netbooks and touchpads. The usage of some of these hardware devices combined with visually rich activities usually offer children an extra motivation to focus on solving the exercises.

Develop interactive and feature-rich online content for children with special education needs (SEN) using this friendly, non-technical guide for teachers and therapists.

What you will learn from this book

• Create activities to match composite pictures with sentences and rich exercises to stimulate both the attention and the concentration.
• Search and organize 3D models to create a 3D scene and work with colors to define skill levels.
• Learn to take advantage of a gamepad and a digital pen to create funny exercises.
• Learn to save portions of the screen as new pictures to use in new activities and create activities to complete words of a sentence according to the pictures.
• Use images and colors to evaluate the mental abstraction of instructions.
• Use pictures, zones, elements, layers, words and colors to evaluate the children association capabilities and the reverse thinking process.
• Create visual activities to find matching pairs and exercise audio patterns recognition and matching.
• Combine videos, sounds, photos, letters, and words to improve long-term memory management.
• Create a complex association activity with visual mathematical operations and their possible results.
• Learn to combine pictures and symbols to improve the concentration when working with mathematical operations.
• Work with image manipulation software to adjust color saturation levels and prepare images with different color tones to use in a colored sequence
• Create exercises to help the parents of the child with SEN to interact with them.
• Use different tools and resources to improve the memory.of the child with SEN

Approach

Written with a step-by-step but friendly and engaging approach, this Packt Beginner's Guide is designed to be placed alongside the computer as your guide and mentor. Step-by-step tutorials are boosted by explanations of the reasoning behind what you are doing. You will quickly pick up the necessary skills, tips, and tricks for creating practical exercises using Moodle 1.9 with practical examples and see how the child with special education needs progresses.

Who this book is written for

If you are an SEN teacher or SEN therapist with minimal knowledge of Moodle who is willing to exploit Web 2.0 possibilities using Moodle 1.9 as the background platform, this book is for you.