Preface

Moodle 2.5 Multimedia provides you with everything you need to include pictures, sound, video, animations, interactive elements, 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 everyday life using Moodle, where teachers and students will be required to create, share, and discuss multimedia works. Music was chosen as the main 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 Ukulele), 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.

Throughout the book, we will create some dozens of multimedia artifacts that are hopefully relevant, easy-to-do, and as little time-consuming as possible, to develop for us teachers and trainers with busy schedules. And for this, we will use multiple platforms, free software, and web applications.

Better learning is not necessarily a consequence of instruction, so the focus of the proposed activities will be on giving the learner better opportunities to create and share multimedia artifacts, and to dialog about and reflect on these constructions with others. I hope you enjoy it.