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 4: Using Blog to explore texts


Aim: Investigate the meaning of interesting words through their context

Moodle modules: Blog and Blog Tags block

Extra programs: Optional — HTML block with link to online dictionary

Ease of setup: **

One of the appealing features of Moodle is that parts of it can be personalized by students. We can see this in Chapter 3, Vocabulary Activities with the My Moodle Personal Glossary, in Chapter 7, Writing Activities with personal profiles and journals, and in most of the other chapters with blogs and wikis. In this activity we are going to apply the personal factor to blogs. We can help students choose their own texts, investigate them using an online dictionary, and highlight interesting words in Moodle Tags. Tags are keywords that we associate with a text. We can display a collection of tags in a tag block like this.

In the following screenshot, music is the most popular tagged word.

If we click on one of the tags, we can see the blog that they come from.

In...