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 3: Using Choice for voting on texts


Aim: Using polls to vote on a text

Moodle modules: Choice

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: *

Yes, it's good to promote a serious attitude to learning, but whenever we bring in some fun, motivation levels always seem to go up. One way of doing this in Moodle, as we saw in Chapter 3, Vocabulary Activities, is to get students to vote on texts that they have read. Which one was better?

The texts could be simple, like motivational quotes, or longer like extracts from websites, or reviews. You could also get students to read the information on a story from a book cover or a website and then vote on it. The Choice module allows students to select just one response. In the example below they'll decide which of two books they'd rather read. The back cover information and images in each case are taken from Amazon.com. You can copy and paste the text and right-click on the images in Amazon to save them.

Here's how to do it

  1. On the course page, click on Turn editing...