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

Activity 5: Using tags to highlight vocabulary and link to example stories


Aim: Help students process meaning by creating stories based on keywords

Moodle modules: Block and Blog

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: *

There's nothing like telling a story to make language come alive. The context endows the words with more meaning, makes them easier to remember, and makes the whole process of language learning more enjoyable.

One way of doing this in face-to-face classes is for students to take a word or a group of words and create a short story from them. This Moodle activity does the same thing. It has the advantage that the stories are available to be viewed by the other students in the class. Also, in the variation we're about to create, we'll produce definitions of the vocabulary that students will use in their stories. At the end of the activity, students will be able to access the stories and/or definitions via a tag cloud block on the course page.

Preparation

  1. First, we prepare the key words...