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

Part 1: Overview of Moodle


Installing Moodle

I'm assuming you already have Moodle installed and are familiar with the basics. The activities in this book are based on Version 1.9.5. There are various possibilities if you don't have it installed:

  • Ask your IT support person.

  • Go to http://download.moodle.org/ and download it yourself. The support pages on this site are well written. You will need a domain name and a server to host it on. Make sure you have at least PHP 4.3, MySQL 4.1.16, or Postgres 8 on your server too. If possible, get the latest versions of each of these.

  • If you don't want to, or can't do it yourself, you could approach a Moodle hosting company. I've put up a list of some of these on the http://moodleflair.com/ site.

  • Pick up one of Packt's other books on Moodle, such as Moodle E-Learning Course Development (http://www.packtpub.com/learning-moodle-1-9-course-development/book), which has a full commentary on installation.

  • If you just want to try out Moodle on your own Windows machine...