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 3: Using polls to get students to vote on the correctness of grammar items


Aim: Get students to focus on a grammar point in a fun way

Moodle modules: Choice

Extra programs: NanoGong (optional)

Ease of setup: *

Another way of bringing a fun element into grammar is to turn it into a game. In this activity, students vote on whether some grammar is correct or not. The activity is similar to Chapter 3, Vocabulary Activities, Activity 6 in which students vote on the meaning of a word. Here are some ideas for questions that we could set up:

  • Agreement (subject + verb)

  • Tenses

  • Word order

  • Spelling

  • Punctuation

  • Modal verbs

In this example students have to vote on whether a sentence is acceptable in a given register. This is what students will see:

Here's how to do it

  1. On the course page, click on Turn editing on. Go to the Add an activity... drop-down menu, and select Choice.

  2. Fill in the settings page as follows.

    Settings

    Details

    Choice name

    Write an appropriate title for the activity. Let's call this A...