Book Review: Moodle Multimedia Cookbook.

The book: http://www.packtpub.com/moodle-2-5-multimedia-cookbook/book.

This is the second edition of the book by Silvina P. Hillar and published by Packt (http://www.packtpub.com). The book surveys a wide range of techniques for using images, audio and video in Moodle courses. It also covers the use of cloud storage and cloud apps like Dropbox, Box.net, Google Drive and Apps, YouTube and Office 365 among others.

I was impressed by the huge range of mainly free tools and websites that were not only covered in the book but also put to good use in Moodle courses. You won’t be short of ideas for the classroom after dipping into this collection.

The target audience would seem to be mainly Middle and High School, judging from the examples but many could be adapted for both younger and older students. There is an excellent account of file types (eg vectors and bitmaps) and optimising images for web presentation which will be very useful to those who only have a limited understanding of these issues.

It is good to see open source software such as Gimp and Inkscape getting mentions if not, given the size and range of the book, thorough coverage. There is certainly enough to get those unfamiliar with these packages started.

Finally the book is, if not exactly rounded out, concluded with a brief account of enabling the most commonly encountered repositories so that files can be accessed in Moodle directly from the file picker. All in all this is as the title says a recipe book with many useful hints, tips and suggestions for teachers to work with, apply and extend. Teachers who intend to use the book should be familiar with navigation and basic course editing techniques in a Moodle installation.

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