Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching

Overview of this book

That word Moodle keeps cropping up all over the place ñ it's in the newspapers, on other teachers' tongues, in more and more articles. Do you want to find out more about it yourself and learn how to create all sorts of fun and useful online language activities with it? Your search ends right here. This book demystifies Moodle and provides you with answers to your queries. It helps you create engaging online language learning activities using the Moodle platform. It has suggestions and fully working examples for adapting classroom activities to the Virtual Learning Environment. This book breaks down the core components of a typical language syllabus ñ speaking, pronunciation, listening, reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, and assessment ñ and shows you how to use Moodle 1.9 to create complete, usable activities that practise them. Each chapter starts with activities that are easier to set up and progresses to more complex ones. Nevertheless, it's a recipe book so each activity is independent. We start off with a brief introduction to Moodle so that you're ready to deal with those specific syllabus topics, and conclude with building extended activities that combine all syllabus elements, making your course attractive and effective. Building activities based on the models in this book, you will develop the confidence to set up your own Moodle site with impressive results.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Activity 9: Creating a crossword in Hot Potatoes


Aim: Help students practice vocabulary

Moodle modules: Hot Potatoes (Moodle)

Extra programs: Hot Potatoes (external program)

Ease of setup: **

Hot Potatoes is a free, easy-to-use quiz-making program, and is ideal for setting up quick quizzes to review or test students. It can be used for reviewing other skills as well. It is great for testing or reviewing grammar, reading, and listening, as well as vocabulary. In this activity we're going to look at an activity not available in Moodle, JCross, which produces crosswords. It's also easier to use than Moodle's Quiz module on the whole.

Here's how to do it

  1. Download the Hot Potatoes program onto your computer. See Chapter 2, Getting Started with Moodle for more information on this.

  2. Open the Hot Potatoes program and choose JCross.

  3. We are immediately presented with a crossword grid, which we fill in as we wish.

  4. Click on Show Clues Window. Then we write in the clues we want.

  5. Next we click on Export and Create...