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 4: Using the rating facility to provide feedback on students' definitions


Aim: Prompt students to improve their definitions

Moodle modules: Glossary

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: *

Feedback … students love it. So do teachers. Most of us want to know how well we're doing.

There are lots of ways of providing feedback in Moodle. In this activity we get students to write definitions of new words in a glossary. Then we give feedback by using the glossary rating facility. This will give them a chance to improve on the definitions, and will help them to understand the words better. The rating facility uses a fixed scale which will provide a preformed comment on students' words. It will help them decide how much they need to rewrite them. In the following example, Jill Smith has written a definition of put up with and got a rating of good basic definition. She knows that she needs to add detail to make it better.

We could add more detail by adding comments to the students' definitions....