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 11: Summarizing RSS news items


Aim: Help students improve each other's writing

Moodle modules: RSS block and forum

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: **

Summarizing text can be a good way to practice reading and writing. It focuses students on key bits of information and encourages them to organize and express that information in concise ways.

The idea behind this activity is that students select a story from the Internet. They then write a summary of it in a forum. To make it more interesting, you could get students to include why they chose that particular item. That might provoke comment and discussion from other forum members.

To make it easier for students to select a story, we will provide news feeds to stories. News feeds contain just the headlines and first few words of the news stories. They make it easy for students to skim over several stories. Here's an example of a news feed for IMDb news:

News feeds are also called RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It...