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 1: Setting up a class glossary


Aim: Build a collection of useful, searchable vocabulary items

Moodle modules: Glossary

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: *

Making vocabulary lists is nothing new for most students. So what's different about Moodle's Glossary? Well, for a start, it's easy to set up, and is a good activity to start with. Much of the default setup won't even need changing. The big advantage of the Moodle Glossary is that we can manipulate our wordlists. We can sort them by author, category, and entry. We can enhance our glossary with other media, such as images and audio and video recordings. Glossary entries, called "concepts" in Moodlespeak, can then be automatically linked to other texts. So if our students are reading a text in Moodle with a potentially unknown word in it, we can create an entry in the glossary for that word. They then have an automatic link from the difficult word in the text to the glossary entry.

To sum up, glossaries are good to use for vocabulary...