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 7: Preparing a class discussion using Chat


Aim: Help students prepare vocabulary and points of view for a face-to-face discussion

Moodle modules: Chat

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: *

One way of preparing students for a chat in class is to write your chat in the Moodle Chat module first. This gives students more time to think of the vocabulary they need and allows you to feed in new vocabulary or expressions. Since it's hard to have a Moodle chat with more than about six participants, try breaking the class into two or more groups and inviting them to separate chat sessions. Each one could last about ten minutes. This separation allows you to prepare different aspects of the same topic. So if, for example, you're going to have a discussion about the pros and cons of watching videos on cell phones, you could chat with one group about the pros and with another group about the cons.

You could just nominate groups in your f2f (face-to-face) class to attend Moodle chat sessions at certain...