Book Image

Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook

Book Image

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.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 English Teacher's Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface

Chapter 9. Working with Mind Maps and Tree Diagrams

Mind maps and tree diagrams are great techniques that can be used as prewriting activities in order to gather and organize all the information before the final piece of writing. These techniques share characteristics in that they belong to the business world, but they also adjust to education. Both are graphic techniques with a central keyword from which secondary ideas are connected.

The mind mapping technique was created by the British psychologist, Tony Buzan. You can read Tony Buzan's profile in this link, http://www.mind-mapping.co.uk/tony-buzan-biog.htm. A mind map is a tool that helps us to organize thoughts in a non-linear way. The advantages of using mind maps as prewriting activities are that you can facilitate the use of the right hemisphere of the brain, stimulate creativity, provide a global view, and foster the association of ideas.

Tree diagrams are used to differentiate between two things, so you can use either vocabulary...