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

Chapter 2. Getting Started with Moodle

One of the great things about Moodle is that the Moodle forums on the main Moodle site http://moodle.org are packed with useful discussions and resources. If you have a problem or a question, it's pretty likely that someone else will have had the same problem, and will have started up a discussion and found a solution. However, a common bit of feedback I get from teachers is that there is simply too much helpful information on the site, and they don't know where to start. One of my aims in this chapter, then, is to identify administrative functions that are particularly useful for language teachers and present them in a simple, clear way. But don't let this stop you from exploring the forums and help files on the moodle.org site where you can look for Moodle docs these are useful help documents which are accessible from many of your Moodle site pages via the Moodle Docs link. You'll see the link at the bottom of the page, usually.

And if there isn't...