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 6: Using polls to vote on the meaning of words


Aim: Focus students' attention on a keyword in a fun way

Moodle modules: Choice

Extra programs: Recording program (optional)

Ease of setup: *

If we turn language learning into fun, students often forget that they're learning. One way of doing that with Moodle is to use the Choice module. Students vote for a meaning of a word and can compare their answers to their peers'. It will work best if you get all your students involved. Let's take a look at two variations of this activity.

Variation 1: Defining a word

In this first variation, we get students to focus on a word that has been particularly difficult or we suspect will be difficult. Students will see the word and have to choose which definition they think is the right one. Once several students have answered, the graphic display will illustrate their results like the following:

Here's how to do it

  1. On the course page, click on Turn editing on. Go to the Add an activity... drop-down menu and...