Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook

Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook

Overview of this book

Connecting the ideas of students is one of the most difficult tasks to carry out in the teaching process. Performing these types of tasks through Moodle will help you overcome complex situations while you teach. If you are looking for a guide that will show you how to improve your skills in using Moodle, as well as enhance your way of teaching in virtual classrooms, your search ends right here.This cookbook provides a practical, step-by-step guide to building a complete reading comprehension, writing, and composition course in Moodle 1.9 starting with simple activities and ending with complex ones. It covers many features and techniques in order to allow you to organize your ideas to improve writing using Moodle as a virtual learning platform.This book begins with simple activities in order to enhance students' writing, such as connecting activities developed in different ways either using Moodle or free and open source software available in the Web 2.0. Then, it moves into matching images and different pieces of writing; it shows how to import different pictures to the Moodle course in different ways. It caters for a great variety of images that will brighten the creativity of students.Then reading comprehension is explored from the characters' point of view; students should explore the reading in such a way to become part of it and write as if they were part of the story.Twitter and Facebook social networks are embedded in the Moodle course in order to invent stories, create group works, and create social on fashion interaction hand in hand with the virtual classroom. There are step-by-step activities involving these websites and inserting Ishikawa's management technique in order to enhance group writing.Once you have reached this point of the book there are other writing techniques explored such as mathematical association to writing, cube technique, discussion clock, mind mapping, and tree diagrams among others. A step-by-step guide is provided for creating these techniques, uploading them into the Moodle course, and creating the writing activity.The book covers writing sentences, poems, songs, descriptions, compositions, essays, articles, cartoons, ads, and creating and describing superheroes.

Moodle 1.9 English Teacher's Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

Acknowledgement

About the Reviewer

Preface

Free Chapter

Connecting Ideas

Introduction

Matching sentences

Unjumbling and connecting sentences

Using Twitter and Facebook for a survey

Brainstorming ideas using Forums

Answering a quiz designed in a Lesson

Empty book, great story: upload pictures from Microsoft Word

Connecting stairs: Uploading drawings from Microsoft Word

Linking to websites and writing about an endangered animal

Matching Pictures and Text

Introduction

Picturing comprehension

Matching text to speech bubbles of comic strips

Picture paragraph matching

Sceneries and possible stories through flowcharts

Working with paintings—Salvador Dali's art

Choosing a book by its cover

Advising posters

Cooking recipes

Looking at Things from Different Perspectives

Introduction

Becoming a well-known character

Understanding secondary characters

Adding technology to a story

Statues can think

Changing an adventure

Old age versus childhood

Beauty versus ugliness

Curious characters

Defining Types of Sentences

Introduction

Embedding videos, games, and matching the correct topic sentence

Writing detailed sentences according to the topic sentence

Multiple choice: choose the correct concluding sentence

Mixing paragraphs

Selecting the correct sentences

Adding detailed sentences

Writing topics and concluding sentences

Hamburger paragraph: writing a composition using three types of sentences

Creating Stories using Twitter and Facebook

Introduction

Debating a topic

Cause-and-effect diagram, Fishbone, or Ishikawa diagram technique

Positive and negative points list

Play the reporter

Writing a story guessing facts

Writing a very short play using text messages

Chain composition

How to summarize information

Improving Your Students' Writing

Introduction

Cubing technique: Describe

Cubing technique: Compare

Cubing technique: Associate

Cubing technique: Analyse

Cubing technique: Apply

Cubing technique: Argue

Rolling a cube

How to correct this essay

Comparing using Venn Diagrams

Introduction

Summer holidays versus winter holidays— drawing Venn diagrams using OpenOffice Drawing

Living in the country versus living in an overcrowded city—drawing Venn diagrams with clip art from Microsoft Word

Being famous versus being unknown— drawing Venn diagrams with SmartDraw software

Having a healthy lifestyle versus bad habits—completing a Venn diagram using the classtools.net website

Famous coincidences—drawing Venn diagrams of Abraham Lincoln and John Fitzgerald Kennedy using Paint

Comparing different types of pollution— drawing Venn diagrams using Microsoft Visio 2007

Types of students—drawing Venn diagrams using Edraw Max

Puzzles—placing adjectives and sentences in a Venn diagram according to the description of personal possessions

Composing New Sceneries

Introduction

Updating a fairy tale—using a database to guide writing activity

Changing a poem into a cartoon—using resources from Web 2.0

Listening to a poem and writing another end to it

Imagining that your house is a palace

Superheroes have other powers—creating your own hero using tools from Web 2.0

Flying shoes—creating an advertisement using animoto.com

Becoming your idol—using Quandary 2 in Moodle

Creating a writing activity

Working with Mind Maps and Tree Diagrams

Introduction

Pictures in mind maps—using Buzan's iMindMap V4

Adding data to pictures—creating a mind map using MindMeister

Providing a situation to a story—drawing a mind map using Draw Anywhere

Creating mind maps using resources from Web 2.0

Creating a tree diagram using Microsoft Word

Pictures in a tree diagram—creating a tree diagram using creately.com

Completing a tree diagram comparing two people using my.lovelycharts.com

Comparing the Flintstones and the Simpsons—using cacoo.com to create a tree diagram

Preparing a Discussion Clock

Introduction

How to prepare a discussion clock—words to cover different viewpoints

Writing from a viewpoint—using tiny URLs in the discussion clock

Picturing the clock diagram—adding images

Music in the clock diagram—embedding MP3 files to our Moodle course

Just words—using a target diagram to create a discussion clock and creating a story out of it

Questions in the clock diagram—writing a newspaper article

Correcting through a clock diagram

Designing a discussion clock in order to create an aircraft using resources from Web 2.0

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Brainstorming ideas using Forums

In this recipe, we are going to connect different images. We are going to use Forums so that all the students can comment on two different things, and we are going to guide their writing with general questions. I propose that the title gives them a hint on what they are going to deal with, but the images that they are going to see are two websites with information. You may wonder, 'Why?' Remember the premise of reading before writing. They are to read about two different places and then they are going to write about them. A way to enhance the students' vocabulary is to make them read and give them hints on it.

Getting ready

We are going to design a Forum activity. We enter the course and select the Weekly outline section in which we want to add the activity. Let's Moodle it!

How to do it...

To design the activity previously introduced, you are going to follow these steps:

1. Click on Add an activity and select Forum, as shown in the following screenshot:

2. In the Forum name block, write the title of the activity, and in Forum introduction, write what they are going to do. Visit the two websites, and after visitation, answer the guiding questions (it is somewhat similar to the 'Six Thinking Hats Technique' by Edward de Bono).
3. We are going to create a link to the two websites. One of them is http://www.statueofliberty.org/, which is a link to the official website of the Statue of Liberty, and the other is a link to http://www.yosemite.org/, which is a link to the official website of Yosemite National Park.
4. Highlight the words Website number one, click on the Insert Web Link icon, and then complete the block. In Target, select New window.
5. Repeat the same process for Website number two, and create a link to the Yosemite National Park website.
6. This activity is displayed in the next screenshot:

7. Click on Save and return to course.

How it works...

When students click on the activity, it appears as shown in the next screenshot:

Students are to click on Add a new discussion topic, and an editor appears where they can write the answers to the questions given there. They can also keep these websites open in different windows so that they don't have to close the activity.

The aim is that each student should comment on these two different places explaining what they think. They are expected to write simple paragraphs, as they will write articles or descriptions in further chapters. In order to answer these questions, they will have to think and use some of the vocabulary that they have already seen in the websites.

Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook

Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook

Overview of this book

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Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook

Brainstorming ideas using Forums

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...