Book Image

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.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 English Teacher's Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface

Adding data to pictures—creating a mind map using MindMeister


In this recipe, we are going to work with MindMeister software, which is free and open source. We are going to create a mind map, inserting links to websites, which contain information as well as pictures. Why? Because if we include more information in the mind map, we are going to lead our students on how to write. Apart from that, they are going to read more before writing and we are also exercising reading comprehension in a way. However, they may also summarize information if we create a link to a website. So let's get ready!

Getting ready

We are going to enter http://www.mindmeister.com/ and then Sign up for free. There is one version which is free to use, or you may choose the other two that are commercial. After signing up, we are going to develop a mind map for our students to work with.

There is a video which is a tutorial explaining in a very simple and easy way on how to design a mind map using this software. So it...