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 Hot Potatoes to investigate texts


Aim: Help students understand texts better

Moodle modules: Hot Potatoes

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: **

In Activity 5 we looked at using Questionnaire to ask questions which get students to think about texts and include question types for measuring degrees of perception and attitude.

Sometimes we may want more straightforward quizzes using matching or multiple-choice questions. We can either do these in Quiz, or we can use Hot Potatoes. The big advantages of Hot Potatoes are that it is much simpler to set up and you can easily embed images, sound, and video in the questions. The main disadvantages are that it is easier for students to cheat with Hot Potatoes by clicking on the back button and clicking on hint to see each letter of a word. Also, it is not a central part of the Moodle gradebook. So, if you want to set up an activity that could be used as a test, you may be better off using Quiz. However, as we already made a matching activity...