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: Writing encyclopedia entries using Glossary


Aim: Help students improve their ability to write clear descriptions

Moodle modules: Glossary

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: *

If you tell students they're going to write an encyclopedia, they'll probably look bemused. It sounds like a daunting task. But if you know that the students live in a pretty town with lots of tourists, and you tell them they're going to do a project in which each student takes photos and describes various parts of the town, they might well get interested. So the key challenge is to find a topic that is appropriate to your class and present it in an enticing way. If we use Glossary to present the bits of information, the end result will be a mini encyclopedia.

Here is a quick brainstorm of topics that might work, but the topic for the encyclopedia depends very much on the age, interests, and language level of the students:

  • Towns in your area/country/the world

  • Historical events

  • Musicians

  • Famous people

  • Tourist sights...