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

Webquests


These have become a popular way of guiding students to find out information on the Web. They follow the spirit of Moodle in that they encourage individual thinking and a constructivist approach to learning (http://docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy). They could be simple knowledge hunts in which students gather some information and report back. Or they could be more engaging webquests in which students raise their critical awareness by evaluating different sorts of information they find. Here's an example of each:

Knowledge hunt about London

Students are asked to find out some basic information about London: population, ethnic makeup, and interesting facts about the transport system. They are given some useful websites to visit, like http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/londonfacts/keyfacts/default.htm. They then present this information to their class.

Webquest about having a sixth runway at London Heathrow Airport

Students are asked to evaluate the viability of a sixth runway at London's...