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 Mindmap to brainstorm writing assignments


Aim: Help students explore and organize a range of ideas which they can use for writing

Moodle modules: None

Extra programs: Mindmap

Ease of setup: *

Before students begin their writing projects, they may find it useful to share ideas and vocabulary that they can use. One way of doing this is to use the add-on module, Mindmap. It's a simple program, and doesn't have the sophistication of other Mindmap programs that allow you to embed audio, video, and hyperlinks. However, it's useful for setting out a multi-level Mindmap on a topic that students are going to write about. It can be used in conjunction with Activities 5, 9 and 12, which focus on creative writing. It can also be treated as a vocabulary activity. We can modify the settings (Step 3) to make this an individual activity, a small group activity or a whole class activity. To achieve the first two groupings, you'll need to set up groupings. There's help with that in Chapter 2...