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Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook

Book Image

Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook

Overview of this book

Connecting the ideas of students is one of the most difficult tasks to carry out in the teaching process. Performing these types of tasks through Moodle will help you overcome complex situations while you teach. If you are looking for a guide that will show you how to improve your skills in using Moodle, as well as enhance your way of teaching in virtual classrooms, your search ends right here.This cookbook provides a practical, step-by-step guide to building a complete reading comprehension, writing, and composition course in Moodle 1.9 starting with simple activities and ending with complex ones. It covers many features and techniques in order to allow you to organize your ideas to improve writing using Moodle as a virtual learning platform.This book begins with simple activities in order to enhance students' writing, such as connecting activities developed in different ways either using Moodle or free and open source software available in the Web 2.0. Then, it moves into matching images and different pieces of writing; it shows how to import different pictures to the Moodle course in different ways. It caters for a great variety of images that will brighten the creativity of students.Then reading comprehension is explored from the characters' point of view; students should explore the reading in such a way to become part of it and write as if they were part of the story.Twitter and Facebook social networks are embedded in the Moodle course in order to invent stories, create group works, and create social on fashion interaction hand in hand with the virtual classroom. There are step-by-step activities involving these websites and inserting Ishikawa's management technique in order to enhance group writing.Once you have reached this point of the book there are other writing techniques explored such as mathematical association to writing, cube technique, discussion clock, mind mapping, and tree diagrams among others. A step-by-step guide is provided for creating these techniques, uploading them into the Moodle course, and creating the writing activity.The book covers writing sentences, poems, songs, descriptions, compositions, essays, articles, cartoons, ads, and creating and describing superheroes.

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Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook
Jul, 2010 | 304 pages
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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 English Teacher's Cookbook
Moodle 1.9 English Teacher's Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Connecting Ideas
Connecting Ideas
Introduction
Matching sentences
Unjumbling and connecting sentences
Using Twitter and Facebook for a survey
Brainstorming ideas using Forums
Answering a quiz designed in a Lesson
Empty book, great story: upload pictures from Microsoft Word
Connecting stairs: Uploading drawings from Microsoft Word
Linking to websites and writing about an endangered animal
2
Matching Pictures and Text
Matching Pictures and Text
Introduction
Picturing comprehension
Matching text to speech bubbles of comic strips
Picture paragraph matching
Sceneries and possible stories through flowcharts
Working with paintings—Salvador Dali's art
Choosing a book by its cover
Advising posters
Cooking recipes
3
Looking at Things from Different Perspectives
Looking at Things from Different Perspectives
Introduction
Becoming a well-known character
Understanding secondary characters
Adding technology to a story
Statues can think
Changing an adventure
Old age versus childhood
Beauty versus ugliness
Curious characters
4
Defining Types of Sentences
Defining Types of Sentences
Introduction
Embedding videos, games, and matching the correct topic sentence
Writing detailed sentences according to the topic sentence
Multiple choice: choose the correct concluding sentence
Mixing paragraphs
Selecting the correct sentences
Adding detailed sentences
Writing topics and concluding sentences
Hamburger paragraph: writing a composition using three types of sentences
5
Creating Stories using Twitter and Facebook
Creating Stories using Twitter and Facebook
Introduction
Debating a topic
Cause-and-effect diagram, Fishbone, or Ishikawa diagram technique
Positive and negative points list
Play the reporter
Writing a story guessing facts
Writing a very short play using text messages
Chain composition
How to summarize information
6
Improving Your Students' Writing
Improving Your Students' Writing
Introduction
Cubing technique: Describe
Cubing technique: Compare
Cubing technique: Associate
Cubing technique: Analyse
Cubing technique: Apply
Cubing technique: Argue
Rolling a cube
How to correct this essay
7
Comparing using Venn Diagrams
Comparing using Venn Diagrams
Introduction
Summer holidays versus winter holidays— drawing Venn diagrams using OpenOffice Drawing
Living in the country versus living in an overcrowded city—drawing Venn diagrams with clip art from Microsoft Word
Being famous versus being unknown— drawing Venn diagrams with SmartDraw software
Having a healthy lifestyle versus bad habits—completing a Venn diagram using the classtools.net website
Famous coincidences—drawing Venn diagrams of Abraham Lincoln and John Fitzgerald Kennedy using Paint
Comparing different types of pollution— drawing Venn diagrams using Microsoft Visio 2007
Types of students—drawing Venn diagrams using Edraw Max
Puzzles—placing adjectives and sentences in a Venn diagram according to the description of personal possessions
8
Composing New Sceneries
Composing New Sceneries
Introduction
Updating a fairy tale—using a database to guide writing activity
Changing a poem into a cartoon—using resources from Web 2.0
Listening to a poem and writing another end to it
Imagining that your house is a palace
Superheroes have other powers—creating your own hero using tools from Web 2.0
Flying shoes—creating an advertisement using animoto.com
Becoming your idol—using Quandary 2 in Moodle
Creating a writing activity
9
Working with Mind Maps and Tree Diagrams
Working with Mind Maps and Tree Diagrams
Introduction
Pictures in mind maps—using Buzan's iMindMap V4
Adding data to pictures—creating a mind map using MindMeister
Providing a situation to a story—drawing a mind map using Draw Anywhere
Creating mind maps using resources from Web 2.0
Creating a tree diagram using Microsoft Word
Pictures in a tree diagram—creating a tree diagram using creately.com
Completing a tree diagram comparing two people using my.lovelycharts.com
Comparing the Flintstones and the Simpsons—using cacoo.com to create a tree diagram
10
Preparing a Discussion Clock
Preparing a Discussion Clock
Introduction
How to prepare a discussion clock—words to cover different viewpoints
Writing from a viewpoint—using tiny URLs in the discussion clock
Picturing the clock diagram—adding images
Music in the clock diagram—embedding MP3 files to our Moodle course
Just words—using a target diagram to create a discussion clock and creating a story out of it
Questions in the clock diagram—writing a newspaper article
Correcting through a clock diagram
Designing a discussion clock in order to create an aircraft using resources from Web 2.0

Answering a quiz designed in a Lesson

Answering a quiz may lead towards a well-written personal description. We are going to design a quiz so that our students can write their biography or just their habits and routines, including their personal likes and dislikes. They can answer questions about themselves or we can add a link to a website showing the life of a famous person so that they write about him or her.

Getting ready

We are going to design a guided writing activity using a Lesson. First of all, we are going to design the activity so that our students write about themselves. Then we will put in details about a famous person, and finally add a link about that person's life to the website. We enter the course and select the Weekly outline section in which we want to add the activity. Let's Moodle it!

How to do it...

You are going to design this activity in a Lesson, so you have to click on Add an activity and select Lesson, as shown in the next screenshot:

  1. 1. Complete the Name block by writing the title of the activity, as shown in the next screenshot:

  1. 2. You can either change the other items or keep them unchanged according to your choice.

  2. 3. Click on Save and display.

How it works...

Then what do you do? You have to write questions for guided writing! A screen appears with four options. You have to select Add a Question Page and write the questions for guided writing. These are the steps to follow:

  1. 1. Click on Add a Question Page.

  2. 2. Choose Essay.

  3. 3. Write a title in the Page title block.

  4. 4. Complete the Page contents with the questions for the guided writing, as shown in the next screenshot:

  1. 5. Click on Add a question page.

  2. 6. Then go back to the course.

  3. 7. Your students can write their biography!

There's more...

You may also design another similar type of activity, but in this case students can write about the biography of a famous person.

Writing somebody's biography using a link to a website

You are going to add a link to a website so that students can write a biography about a famous person. You can ask students to rewrite the biography of Amelia Earhart in a simpler way. They are going to answer questions similar to the ones designed for their biography, or you may change them.

You are going to follow these steps:

  1. 1. Click on Add an activity and choose Lesson.

  2. 2. Complete the Name block by writing Amelia Earhart's biography in this block.

  3. 3. Scroll down the page and complete the block Pop-up to file or web page by entering the name of the website http://www.ameliaearhart.com/about/bio.html, as shown in the following screenshot:

  1. 4. Click on Save and display.

  2. 5. Select Add a Question Page, click on Essay, and fill Page title with the title of the activity. Then fill out Page contents with the questions that guide the writing.

  3. 6. Click on Add a Questions Page.

  4. 7. Go back to the course.

When students want to do an activity, the difference between this activity and the previous one is that they are going to see the Linked media icon. When they click on Click here to view, the website link will appear, as shown in the following screenshot:

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