Moodle 1.9 Multimedia: Create and share multimedia learning materials in your Moodle courses.

Reinventing the wheel, especially for teachers, is a great path to burn-out. Creating pictures for our courses (photos, drawings, and icons), if we are working from scratch, is extremely time-consuming, adding to the course design effort, interaction with students, or worse, assessment. Fortunately, we are not working alone anymore, as there are many places on the Web where, with the help of millions, we can get ready-made pictures, for free (well, sometimes searching for a nice picture can take a while, but it can be worth the effort!). But first, let's take a look at the basic image formats, before we go on to see the places where we can find free online pictures.

Inserting images in Moodle is really easy. Now that we have a source of free pictures for our course, there are several ways to insert them, depending on the type of resource or activity that we are using. We will have a look at the following three ways in this book:

For now, let's just look at the first two ways of inserting images.

The usual cliché "a picture is worth more than a thousand words" sometimes convinces me. Especially, if we are talking about our students creating these images, by photographing, drawing, or making collages, and discussing these with their peers. Using strong images to introduce themes is a great starter and a nice context to question students. Pictures seem to resonate with many students in textbooks, course material, illustrating reports, raw material for photo stories or story boards, and as assignment products in general. Give students a digital camera and they'll just start photographing and filming without any limitations. And now it's quick and cheap to take even a thousand photos.

As teachers, we also use a lot of pictures in presentations, exams and exercises, department or club panels, to photograph experiments, activities and students' works, to create mascots made of collages, and many other things. I did all of this as a teacher,...

Capturing screenshots can be very useful if we are:

We can take screenshots in one of the following two ways:

Now it...

Comics are a great way of telling a story. They can be used to:

If you are getting worried that we will have to draw something and your skills are, well, those of a 10 year old kid, that's not a problem, as mine aren't that good either! Fortunately, there's a tool just for you and me, called Strip Generator, which will save us from further humiliation in front of our students and colleagues. In our course in Moodle, in Module 5 Being a musician, we will design an activity where students have to create a story based on a day in the life of a musician, and they will be required to use this tool to illustrate this. As we will be using a comic strip, we will be drawing the results in an image. We can then add this work to the Moodle course easily, as an attachment to a forum.

Strip generator (http...

Slideshows are a great way of presenting information and supporting discussions; so we will have a look at the following things that can be useful in Moodle courses:

In this chapter, we started 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 then had a look at different ways of inserting images in Moodle, especially using the HTML editor image upload function. We then started using GIMP for main image editing tasks, such as cropping, resizing, capturing (together with some photography concepts), color correction, photo collage, and saving the images in different formats. Some issues regarding images in Moodle, such as file formats and appropriate sizes, were also discussed, and we used the Print Screen function and Jing to collect screenshots. Strip generator was also used to easily create comic strips. We also learned how to export PowerPoint presentations to images, adding them to a Moodle lesson, or as an alternative publishing these presentations in Slideshare. We concluded this chapter by looking at ways to create...