That word "Moodle" keeps cropping up all over the place — 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.
The book starts with examples based on what you need for your language teaching and shows which bits of Moodle you need to make them. As such, it isn't a comprehensive guide to Moodle, but it aims to provide relevant information for language teachers. There is no one way to organize a language course. It depends on the level and age of students, the language learning goals, and learning style preferences, amongst other things. But most language courses include a focus on the skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and also offer support for vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. This book has taken those areas as its starting point.
Most of this book is a recipe book, a how-to book. In it you'll see activities that you'd find in a typical language-teaching syllabus and learn how you can produce these on Moodle. You'll be provided with step-by-step instructions to copy examples and then adapt them according to your own teaching situation. Most of the activities are ordered so that each chapter starts with easier activities. The ease of setup for each activity is indicated by a star system. Now and then you'll be referred to other chapters where an example already exists.
The non-recipe chapters are guides for setting up Moodle (Chapter 2), using Moodle for Assessment (Chapter 9), making your Moodle site look good (Chapter 11), and helping prepare students to use Moodle (Chapter 12).
Chapter 1, What Does Moodle Offer Language Teachers? outlines the key features of Moodle that make it such an excellent tool for language teaching. It relates Moodle to communicative language teaching syllabuses and provides an outline of the whole book.
Chapter 2, Getting Started with Moodle provides an overview of the administration features you'll need to have in place before you begin. We'll consider the importance of roles, groups, and outcomes, as well as the add-ons that are worth including to make the most of Moodle for language teaching.
Chapter 3, Vocabulary Activities looks at a variety of activities that help students to learn words. It considers how Moodle can help students review and recycle vocabulary, and looks at the different ways of keeping vocabulary records.
Chapter 4, Speaking Activities makes much use of the add-on NanoGong recorder to illustrate activities that look at pronunciation, intonation, fluency, stress, and participation in discussions.
Chapter 5, Grammar Activities is very much at home in Moodle. It's possible to create a wide range of activities for presenting grammar, providing noticing activities, controlled practice using grammar, and keeping grammar records.
Chapter 6, Reading Activities focuses on how you can use Moodle to motivate students to read and interact with texts. There's also an activity on extended reading.
Chapter 7, Writing Activities shows how helpful Moodle can be for collaborative work on drafts, for adding graphics and organizing writing in effective ways.
Chapter 8, Listening Activities looks at the different ways you can present recordings and gives examples of different task types.
Chapter 9, Assessment considers the gradebook and its many uses. The wide range of possibilities is potentially overwhelming. The chapter provides some clear paths through it, and shows how you can use Moodle statistics to improve your assessment activities.
Chapter 10, Extended Activities considers activities that are longer than those already covered, longer in terms of the activity duration and longer to set up, but definitely worthwhile for language teaching.
Chapter 11,Formatting and Enhancing Your Moodle Materials provides some guidelines for making your language learners' experience more effective by checking the quality of text, images, and audio. It also considers the importance of clear navigation paths.
Chapter 12, Preparing Your Students to Use Moodle provides some guidelines for making Moodle part of your students' learning timetable.
Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 are not part of the actual book, but you can download them from Packt's website.
Chapter 11 is available at http://www.packtpub.com/files/6248-Chapter-11.pdf, and Chapter 12 is available at http://www.packtpub.com/files/6248-Chapter-12.pdf.
To follow this book, you need access to a Moodle site where you have been registered. You'll need to work with your Moodle administrator or have administration access yourself to do the set-up work. You'll also need administrative access to do things like override permissions on set-up pages when you're setting up activities. Also helpful is an enthusiasm for learning, teaching, and using the Web to reach out and make a difference in your students' lives.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "He takes {:SHORTANSWER:~=a#well done! ~%20%an#nearly right!} picture of Amy on his phone and sends it to Roxy."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "First, let's make sure we're in editing mode. To do that, click on the Turn editing on button. We always need to do that if we want to add a resource or an activity."
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