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

Planning a sequence of activities


It's quite normal for teachers to create a sequence of activities which reflect a range of skills.

A task-based or content-based approach is a good example of this. In their book, Doing Task-based Teaching, Oxford University Press, 2007, Dave and Jane Willis show how you might combine the following related activities:

The easiest way to provide navigation for learners to follow a sequence of tasks is to set the course view page to topics or weekly format. To do this, go to your course page, and select Administration | Settings | Format. Then choose Topics format or Weekly format.

Using the Topics format you could organize activities according to a given topic. You can hide topics you don't want users to see by clicking on the eye icon in the right-hand corner of the topic. By choosing Weekly format you can organize activities chronologically by weeks.

Once you have chosen your course format, you can set up a sequence of activities. A simple way would be to use...