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 6: Using a Blog or Web page for creative writing


Aim: Help students write creatively

Moodle modules: Blog, OUblog

Extra programs: Kompozer

Ease of setup: *

The previous activity created an opportunity for private writing. You might also want to create a showcase for students' work which other students on the course can view. This can be fun, motivating for writers, and may even be useful to readers. Here are just a few examples of the sort of free writing students could do on Moodle:

  • Diaries

  • Recipes

  • Reviews

  • Jokes

  • Funny stories

  • Writing about niche interests

  • How-to articles

There are various ways of setting up a showcase of students' writing on Moodle. The simplest is to get students to create a Moodle blog. In case you're unfamiliar with blogs, they stand for web logs, and are a sort of public diary. If you've installed the add-on OUblog, you could also allow other students to comment on the blogs. A third variation would be to use the Book module. The disadvantage of this is that students cannot...