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

What is assessment: A brief overview of assessment and how Moodle supports it


You may be familiar with the concepts of qualitative and quantitative approaches to assessment. We can describe students' work in words, commenting on strengths and weaknesses. That's called qualitative assessment. Alternatively, we can assign a numerical score to their work. That's called quantitative assessment. They both have pros and cons:

Qualitative

Quantitative

Describes behavior and is often easier for students to understand

Easier to classify

Students can act on feedback more easily

Easier to count

Provides data in the form of words

Easier to do statistics

More subjective

More objective

Takes longer to set up

Harder for teachers and students to interpret

Takes longer to review

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Choosing which type of assessment to use depends very much on what you want to achieve. If you want to encourage students to practice and work things out for themselves, qualitative assessment will be more helpful...