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 5: Dialog Minus One — helping students build dialogs using a podcast


Aim: Help students participate in a dialog

Moodle modules: Mediacenter (Inwicast)

Extra programs: Audacity

Ease of setup: **

How can we use Moodle to help students prepare themselves for dialog work? Well, one way is to set up a recording where they hear just half the dialog and they have to provide the other half, using prompts that they can listen to independently. Let's call it Dialog Minus One. This sort of activity can help students listen carefully and get used to new words or expressions and practice new language functions such as interrupting, inviting, asking questions, and refusing. The big advantage of Moodle is that they can listen in their own time as often as they want.

Tip

Other ideas

You could also consider producing a video podcast, sometimes called a vodcast. The only disadvantage might be that they're bigger in size and so take up more of your and your students' storage space. The advantage would be...