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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Seitenzahl: 538
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009
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Table of Contents
Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching
Jeff Stanford
Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching
Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: October 2009
Production Reference: 1141009
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847196-24-8
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Parag Kadam (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
Jeff Stanford
Reviewers
Andy Baker
Clive Wright
Acquisition Editor
David Barnes
Development Editor
Swapna V. Verlekar
Technical Editor
Mithun Sehgal
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Editorial Team Leader
Abhijeet Deobhakta
Project Team Leader
Priya Mukherji
Project Coordinator
Leena Purkait
Proofreader
Chris Smith
Graphics
Nilesh Mohite
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
Cover Work
Shantanu Zagade
About the Author
Jeff Stanford is a free-lance educational technologist. He discovered Moodle five years ago, and has remained an ardent fan ever since. He now does regular consultancy work, helping teachers make the most of online learning possibilities. To get away from the computer, he also does training consultancy work for organizations like Anglia Assessment, Fintra, Pearson, and the British Council now and then. He is an Associate tutor in Applied Linguistics for the University of Leicester and a teacher trainer on Cambridge ESOL courses. He also runs a web hosting service and advises on setting up and running Drupal and Moodle websites. You can reach him via http://moodleflair.com and http://moodleforlanguages.co.uk.
I would like to thank my reviewers, Helena Gomm, Malcolm Griffiths, Constanze Eichelbaum, and Maria Stanford, who provided a great deal of constructive feedback on the book. I owe Helena a particular debt of gratitude: if she hadn't coaxed me into writing an article for ETP on Moodle, Packt Publishing's David Barnes wouldn't have come across me and the book would never have been written. I would also like to thank Anthony Gaugham, Tim Francis, and Sue Morris for their helpful comments on some of the chapters.
Thanks must go to Packt Publishing for their impressive patience and support throughout this project.
And finally, I'd like to thank the hundreds of teachers I've worked with who've provided me with feedback and comments that have been so valuable in the writing of this book.
About the Reviewers
Andy Baker is Head of ICT at Bishop Challoner Catholic College in Birmingham. He has a strong interest in innovation, particularly in education, and feels that technology, if used effectively, is fundamental in motivating learners to learn.
When he's not teaching, Andy likes to spend quality time with his wife Vicci and daughters Francesca and Grace.
Andy lives in Worcestershire, England, and can be reached at <[email protected]>.
Clive Wright has been a senior teacher in charge of e-learning as well as a secondary schools advisor working with educational establishments and leading on, amongst other things, the use of Information and Communication Technology in the classroom. He has had extensive experience leading teacher training on the use of new technologies in education. Clive believes that technology can engage and excite young people in their education, enhancing their learning as well as making the learning experience more enjoyable and thereby more effective. He is director of a website software company nomumbojumbo (nomumbojumbo.com), and he also works with schools setting up Moodle environments and providing Moodle training. Clive lives in the medieval Cathedral city of Lichfield in England with his wife Rebecca and four children Ellie, Beth, Hannah, and Will. He can be contacted on <[email protected]>.
Preface
That word "Moodle" keeps cropping up all over the place — 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.
The book starts with examples based on what you need for your language teaching and shows which bits of Moodle you need to make them. As such, it isn't a comprehensive guide to Moodle, but it aims to provide relevant information for language teachers. There is no one way to organize a language course. It depends on the level and age of students, the language learning goals, and learning style preferences, amongst other things. But most language courses include a focus on the skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and also offer support for vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. This book has taken those areas as its starting point.
Most of this book is a recipe book, a how-to book. In it you'll see activities that you'd find in a typical language-teaching syllabus and learn how you can produce these on Moodle. You'll be provided with step-by-step instructions to copy examples and then adapt them according to your own teaching situation. Most of the activities are ordered so that each chapter starts with easier activities. The ease of setup for each activity is indicated by a star system. Now and then you'll be referred to other chapters where an example already exists.
The non-recipe chapters are guides for setting up Moodle (Chapter 2), using Moodle for Assessment (Chapter 9), making your Moodle site look good (Chapter 11), and helping prepare students to use Moodle (Chapter 12).
What this book covers
Chapter 1, What Does Moodle Offer Language Teachers? outlines the key features of Moodle that make it such an excellent tool for language teaching. It relates Moodle to communicative language teaching syllabuses and provides an outline of the whole book.
Chapter 2, Getting Started with Moodle provides an overview of the administration features you'll need to have in place before you begin. We'll consider the importance of roles, groups, and outcomes, as well as the add-ons that are worth including to make the most of Moodle for language teaching.
Chapter 3, Vocabulary Activities looks at a variety of activities that help students to learn words. It considers how Moodle can help students review and recycle vocabulary, and looks at the different ways of keeping vocabulary records.
Chapter 4, Speaking Activities makes much use of the add-on NanoGong recorder to illustrate activities that look at pronunciation, intonation, fluency, stress, and participation in discussions.
Chapter 5, Grammar Activities is very much at home in Moodle. It's possible to create a wide range of activities for presenting grammar, providing noticing activities, controlled practice using grammar, and keeping grammar records.
Chapter 6, Reading Activities focuses on how you can use Moodle to motivate students to read and interact with texts. There's also an activity on extended reading.
Chapter 7, Writing Activities shows how helpful Moodle can be for collaborative work on drafts, for adding graphics and organizing writing in effective ways.
Chapter 8, Listening Activities looks at the different ways you can present recordings and gives examples of different task types.
Chapter 9, Assessment considers the gradebook and its many uses. The wide range of possibilities is potentially overwhelming. The chapter provides some clear paths through it, and shows how you can use Moodle statistics to improve your assessment activities.
Chapter 10, Extended Activities considers activities that are longer than those already covered, longer in terms of the activity duration and longer to set up, but definitely worthwhile for language teaching.
Chapter 11,Formatting and Enhancing Your Moodle Materials provides some guidelines for making your language learners' experience more effective by checking the quality of text, images, and audio. It also considers the importance of clear navigation paths.
Chapter 12, Preparing Your Students to Use Moodle provides some guidelines for making Moodle part of your students' learning timetable.
Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 are not part of the actual book, but you can download them from Packt's website.
Chapter 11 is available at http://www.packtpub.com/files/6248-Chapter-11.pdf, and Chapter 12 is available at http://www.packtpub.com/files/6248-Chapter-12.pdf.
What you need for this book
To follow this book, you need access to a Moodle site where you have been registered. You'll need to work with your Moodle administrator or have administration access yourself to do the set-up work. You'll also need administrative access to do things like override permissions on set-up pages when you're setting up activities. Also helpful is an enthusiasm for learning, teaching, and using the Web to reach out and make a difference in your students' lives.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "He takes {:SHORTANSWER:~=a#well done! ~%20%an#nearly right!} picture of Amy on his phone and sends it to Roxy."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "First, let's make sure we're in editing mode. To do that, click on the Turn editing on button. We always need to do that if we want to add a resource or an activity."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Chapter 1. What Does Moodle Offer Language Teachers?
Imagine the things you do in a school — putting up timetables, presenting syllabuses, having discussions, presenting videos of new materials, organizing tests, collecting marks, providing feedback to students, guiding students to do their own learning, building a library… Moodle can do all these things and much, much more.
What is Moodle?
I just googled "Moodle" and got over 18 million hits. Moodle is one of the fastest growing free, open source VLEs (Virtual Learning Environment) around at the moment. It is also commonly referred to as an LMS (Learning Management System) or a CMS (Course Management System). There are already thousands of registered Moodle sites, as you can see on the Moodle site: http://moodle.org/stats/.
Just in case some of those terms are new to you:
Here are some of the things that make Moodle particularly attractive to all teachers:
There are some myths that Moodle is difficult, unsupported, and will eventually charge users, but these are all calmly deflated at http://docs.moodle.org/en/ Top_10_Moodle_Myths.
Assumptions
Most of this book is a recipe book, a "how-to" book. In it, I'll take activities that you'd find in a typical language-teaching syllabus and show how you can produce these on Moodle. I'll provide step-by-step instructions for you to copy examples and then adapt them according to your own teaching situation. Most of the activities are ordered so that each chapter starts with easier activities. The ease of setup for each activity is indicated by a star system. Now and then you'll be referred to other chapters where an example already exists.
The non-recipe chapters are guides for setting up Moodle (Chapter 2, Getting Started with Moodle), using Moodle for assessment (Chapter 9, Assessment), making your Moodle site look good (Chapter 11, Formatting and Enhancing Your Moodle Materials), and helping prepare students to use Moodle (Chapter 12, Preparing Your Students to Use Moodle).
I'm making a few assumptions:
In case you're not familiar with these concepts, constructivism is based on the idea that individuals learn new things (construct knowledge) through experience by comparing new things to what they already know. They do this by solving realistic problems, often in collaboration with other people. Moodle was built on this approach, and many of the core activities lend themselves well to this type of learning. Communicative language teaching tries to help learners become competent language users in real contexts. There's more about this later in this chapter.
Who is this book for?
One of the advantages of a recipe-book approach is that all sorts of people connected to language teaching will find it useful. If you are a teacher, you can dip into it to find a quick solution for an activity you want to create. If you are a course planner, you can review the whole book to build up your own language course. These are some of the people I had in mind when writing:
An important point here is that there's no single way of using Moodle for language teaching. I've come across teachers who use it mainly as a repository of materials and find the indexing facilities of the Database module useful for that. Module, by the way, is Moodle's word for an activity. Other teachers use it to create supplementary quizzes for the work they do in class. They find the gradebook, which provides an overview of all their students' marks, useful. Other teachers make Moodle the base of their course, even though they have face-to-face sessions, because Moodle is a neat way of keeping important course elements in one place and tracking learner use and progress. It's also a good way of preparing for classes and reflecting on them afterwards. Finally, Moodle can be used as a totally online course with no face-to-face meeting at all.
You might find I'm stating the obvious sometimes, but most hints are included because there were minor hiccoughs when teachers trialed the materials. On the other hand, some readers might feel phased by mention of formats they've never heard of, such as XML or WAV. If that's the case, don't worry! These are usually extra bits of information that some teachers will find useful to make their lives easier or improve the Moodle activities. Not understanding them — or not wanting to understand them — won't stop you from creating the activities.
Why another book on Moodle?
So what's the difference between this book and any other book on Moodle? There's an increasingly large number of books about Moodle on the market. General introductions to Moodle, such as "Moodle Teaching Techniques", William Rice, Packt Publishing and "Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development", William Rice, Packt Publishing, go through key Moodle modules methodically and then offer examples. This book takes the opposite approach: it starts with examples based on what you need for your language teaching and shows which bits of Moodle you need to make them. As such, it isn't a comprehensive guide to Moodle, but it aims to provide relevant information for language teachers. There is no one way to organize a language course. It depends on the level and age of students, the language learning goals, and learning style preferences, amongst other things. But most language courses include a focus on the skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and also offer support for vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. This book has taken those areas as its starting point.
Moodle's popularity has led to the development of hundreds of add-on modules. The list is available at http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?id=6009. A useful service a book like this can offer is recommending which add-on modules are worth getting. For example, a VLE for language learning without a speak and record facility would be incomplete. I've chosen a simple sound recorder called NanoGong. Why? Because it is supported for Moodle 1.9; it's very easy to install and works well on a variety of browsers. You can also set up Moodle activities without NanoGong, simply by recording directly onto the computer, but you'd lose the advantage of being able to manage your recordings inside Moodle. There's a useful discussion of available recorders at http://metamedia.typepad.com/metamedia/listen-up-audio-in-moodle.html.
Note
Voice recording in future versions of Moodle
It's uncertain whether NanoGong will work with Moodle 2.0, but a similar recording plug-in is being developed for it (see http://docs.moodle.org/en/GSOC/2009). Meanwhile, NanoGong is probably the simplest choice.
As well as providing an overview of core Moodle modules, Chapter 2, Getting Started with Moodle will take you through all the add-on modules you'll need for this book. The reasons for choosing them are the same in each case:
It is important to remember that add-on modules may not work with future updates of Moodle, but I've chosen ones which look likely to receive continued support. All the examples in this book work with Moodle 1.9.5.
Sometimes I've recommended an alternative to the core modules, simply because they are better for language teaching. For example, Moodle has core Blog and Wiki modules, but they don't work with NanoGong, the recording tool, whereas the Open University versions named OUblog and OUwiki do work.
Assessment
There are also some aspects of assessment in Moodle which have a specific language-teaching slant in this book:
Making Moodle look good
The success of any activity also depends on how good it looks. Chapter 11, Formatting and Enhancing Your Moodle Materials takes a look at some basic things you can do to make your Moodle site look better and, therefore, more attractive to your students.
Communicative Language Teaching
The book is firmly rooted in a communicative approach to language learning. It therefore tries to make the student the center of the learning experience wherever possible. It looks at ways of encouraging interaction, making materials engaging and effective, and of encouraging reflection and self-improvement on the part of the language learner and the teacher.
A PDF by Jack Richards (http://tinyurl.com/cltarticle) gives a good overview of the status quo of various approaches to communicative language teaching.
In the article "Understanding and Implementing the Clt (Communicative Language Teaching) Paradigm", George M. Jacobs and Thomas S. C. Farrell, RELC Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1, 5-30 (2003), the authors highlight some of the key features of CLT. As the following table shows, Moodle accommodates these features well.
Key features of CLT (based on Jack Richards, 2006, and Jacobs and Farrell, 2003)
Moodle features which support CLT
Learner autonomy: Giving learners greater choice over their own learning, both in terms of the content of learning and processes they might employ. The use of small groups is one example of this, as well as the use of self-assessment.
The social nature of learning: Learning is not an individual, private activity, but a social one that depends upon interaction with others.
Curricular integration: The connection between different strands of the curriculum is emphasized, so that English is not seen as a stand-alone subject but is linked to other subjects in the curriculum. Text-based learning reflects this approach, and seeks to develop fluency in text types that can be used across the curriculum. Project work in language teaching also requires students to explore issues outside of the language classroom.
HTML pages with hyperlinks and webquests are good examples of how Moodle can be linked to the outside world.
Focus on meaning: Meaning is viewed as the driving force of learning. Content-based teaching reflects this view, and seeks to make the exploration of meaning through content the core of language learning activities.
It's easy to incorporate authentic spoken and written texts into Moodle and activities based on them.
Diversity: Learners learn in different ways and have different strengths. Teaching needs to take these differences into account, rather than try to force students into a single mold. In language teaching, this has led to an emphasis on developing students' use and awareness of learning strategies.
Thinking skills: Language should serve as a means of developing higher-order thinking skills, also known as critical and creative thinking. In language teaching, this means that students do not learn language for its own sake but in order to develop and apply their thinking skills in situations that go beyond the language classroom.
Alternative assessment: New forms of assessment are needed to replace traditional multiple-choice and other items that test lower-order skills. Multiple forms of assessment (for example, observation, interviews, journals, portfolios) can be used to build a comprehensive picture of what students can do in a second language.
Moodle offers traditional tests as well as journals and add-on portfolios.
Teachers as co-learners: The teacher is viewed as a facilitator who is constantly trying out different alternatives; that is, learning through doing. In language teaching, this has led to an interest in action research and other forms of classroom investigation.
Age and level of students
Moodle can work for learners of all ages. The examples in this book show how young learners, adolescents, and adults can use Moodle. Clearly, you will need to adapt the example activities for your particular students. Make sure they have the content and tasks that they are likely to enjoy and find useful.
If you are creating tasks for pre-adolescents, you might find it useful to use this book in conjunction with Moodle 1.9 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds: Beginner's Guide, Mary Cooch, Packt Publishing, which offers some useful guidelines on things to look out for with this age group.
It is important when working with learners of all ages that you have:
As for language level, it's possible to create simple low-level tasks, or quite difficult ones.
You'll need to consider whether the whole site is written in the target language. This is probably only appropriate for higher level learners. It may be more effective for lower level learners if you frame the activities in a language they understand better.
You can include the option for learners to change the language for the headings and help files, though help files are not available in all languages. You may need to check with your Moodle administrator that the appropriate language pack is installed. By clicking on the language selector in the top right-hand corner of the screen, users can change to the language of their choice. Contact your Moodle administrator if the languages you want are not there.
Add-on modules are unlikely to have help files and instructions for all languages. If you find that help files are not available in a language you need, you could write to the authors via the moodle.org website, or write them yourself. One of the great things about this open source software is that you can make your own contributions to it. Your Moodle administrator should be able to help you install your new files.
You can also edit existing help files by going to Site Administration | Language | Language editing.
What languages can you teach using Moodle?
All the examples in this book are of ESOL (English as a Second or Other Language). However, Moodle can by used to teach a vast variety of languages. All the instructions in this book are in English, but for lower-level learners you may wish to consider changing the base language to the students' first language (L1) and providing instructions in the L1, too.
The official Moodle site offers several support sections for non-English language use:
Suggested approach to using the book
The introduction to each chapter gives an overview of the whole chapter. So it's worth reading first.
Several reviewers have suggested that a good way to approach the activities in each chapter is to skim through the whole activity first to get a feel for it and then to create the activity step by step in your Moodle course.
Try to make yourself familiar with Chapter 2, Getting Started with Moodle. There is frequent reference to it throughout the book. It contains key information on setting up Moodle modules and add-on modules, using extra programs, combining Moodle with other programs, and advice on things such as uploading images and other files or embedding audio and video in Moodle. Happy Moodling!
Chapter 2. Getting Started with Moodle
One of the great things about Moodle is that the Moodle forums on the main Moodle site http://moodle.org are packed with useful discussions and resources. If you have a problem or a question, it's pretty likely that someone else will have had the same problem, and will have started up a discussion and found a solution. However, a common bit of feedback I get from teachers is that there is simply too much helpful information on the site, and they don't know where to start. One of my aims in this chapter, then, is to identify administrative functions that are particularly useful for language teachers and present them in a simple, clear way. But don't let this stop you from exploring the forums and help files on the moodle.org site where you can look for Moodle docs these are useful help documents which are accessible from many of your Moodle site pages via the Moodle Docs link. You'll see the link at the bottom of the page, usually.
And if there isn't a Moodle Docs link at the bottom of the page on your Moodle site, there might be a useful support file indicated by the icon.
This chapter is divided into four parts:
Part 1
This gives an overview of the makeup of Moodle. It's essential reading if you don't know Moodle well.
Part 2
This identifies key site administration "how-tos", which you'll need to set up to get your Moodle course, or courses, working. You will find this section useful as a reference for the whole book, as it deals with key information.
Part 3
This lists non-essential add-ons.
Part 4
Here you'll find some design principles for setting up your courses.
Part 1: Overview of Moodle
Installing Moodle
I'm assuming you already have Moodle installed and are familiar with the basics. The activities in this book are based on Version 1.9.5. There are various possibilities if you don't have it installed:
Topography of a Moodle site
So what does Moodle look like? Well, there's a front page which is like an outer shell. The next layer down is a course which is a bit like a classroom — all the activities relating to one group of students can be found there.
Note
Which browser?
Moodle works well in most browsers, but if you have trouble viewing some pages, it's worth checking out another one. For example, some of the add-on programs we'll be looking at later don't always work in Firefox.
Topography of a Moodle site: Front page
Front pages typically have site news and a list of available courses. From the front page, users can go directly to their course or click on one of the other items.
As you can see, there are three columns. The thin outer columns contain blocks, which give useful information and other useful functions such as a Main Menu, a Login box, a list of Online Users, and Blog tags — keywords from users' blogs. We'll take a closer look at the range of blocks available later in this chapter. The central area is typically used as a news area, and can give a list of courses, organized into Course categories, which users can click on. If there is a key icon to the right of the course name, it is password protected. You'll set the enrolment key when you create a course. You can also add or change enrolment keys later.
Topography of a Moodle site: Course page
If you click on ICT for ELT resources and forums on the front page, you'll get to a course. In fact, a course in Moodle is an area that can house anything you want it to: forums, a set of materials, or a sequence of activities.
Courses can be organized by topic, week, or social events. Before you set up your course, spend a while deciding how you'd like to organize your course. If you want to make activities available for specific periods, the weekly organization will work well. If you want to create your own topics, as in the screenshot above, then organize your course by topics. The social format looks a bit like a blog site and highlights recent forum postings.
You'll notice that next to each activity, under the Topic outline, there is an icon which identifies which module it is. Before we go though setting up a course, here is a list and brief description of the core blocks and core modules which are referred to in this book and which are automatically installed in your Moodle.
Moodle overview: Core blocks
The blocks are the boxes you can see in the left- and right-hand columns. They are mainly used to provide information about course users, send messages, or show course menus. Though, as you'll see later in this chapter, there are many other uses. Once a course has been created, teachers can click on the Turn editing on button and activate any of the blocks in the table below. Most of them are not mentioned in the activities in this book, but nevertheless have useful functions. Blocks can be moved around the page by clicking on the Turn editing on button and pressing the up, down, and across arrows. If your administrator turns on AJAX and JavaScript, Site Administration | Appearance | AJAX and Javascript, you can move blocks around simply by dragging on the title bar with the mouse — that's Participant Pix in the following screenshot — and moving the block up, down, or across. This screenshot shows the Particpant Pix block being dragged upwards:
Core blocks
Block name
Description
Activities
Lists the activities that are available to students.
Admin bookmarks
Visible only to teachers and administrators. This allows them to create useful bookmarks of pages they visit frequently. For example, students' activity logs.
Administration
Displays a menu of key course settings, such as Settings, Assign Roles, Groups, Backup, and Files.
Blog Menu
A list of blog postings.
Blog Tags
This is a word cloud of tagged words from users' blogs. The more often a word is tagged, the bigger it gets in the cloud.
Calendar
Allows entries at user, course, and site level. User-level entries can only be seen by the persons who entered them; course-level entries only by course users; site-level entries by all site users. There is a tool for downloading the calendar to your desktop calendar. Entries automatically appear when you set up time-bound activities. See the end of this chapter for a guide to using the calendar.
Course/Site Description
An HTML box which allows you to post text, images, video and audio. The label will be Course/Site Description.
Courses
List of courses available on the site.
Global Search
Will search all the site content, and can be useful if you have a very large site. You'll need to set it up first by logging as an administrator - Site Administration | Miscellaneous | Experimental. Then activate the global search engine by checking the enableglobalsearch box.
You can access the Global Search settings via the link in Administration | Modules | Blocks. Note: this only works if you have at least PHP 5 installed on your server.
HTML
An HTML box which allows you to post text, images, video, and audio. You can also embed videos from other websites, like YouTube, if your school firewall permits this. See the end of this chapter for workarounds and for detailed guidance on embedding.
Latest News
Displays the headlines from the latest news forum items.
Login
Displays a login box.
Main Menu
Displays a menu of the activities available on the course.
Messages
Displays Messages information box and provides a link to the message centre.
Online Users
Displays a list of all users who have been actively online within the last 5 minutes.
Random Glossary Entry
Displays a random entry from a chosen glossary. Is useful for a "word of the day" feature, for example.
Remote RSS Feeds
Enables users to see feeds from other websites. For example, BBC news. Can provide automatic links to useful sources of reading material.Search Forums
Will search all forum postings for a given word. Students must have access to the forum to be able to see the post.
Site Administration
Key site settings: this is covered in detail in this chapter.
Tags
Same idea as blog tags, but the tagged words come from the interests entry in user profiles. Users can edit their profiles by clicking on their name in the top right-hand corner of the screen once they've enrolled and logged on.
Upcoming Events
Displays calendar events which are due soon on the course.
Moodle overview: Add-on blocks
There are two add-on blocks in this book. As with add-on modules, which we'll look at later, the installation instructions are available as readme.txt files on the download page: http://moodle.org| Downloads | Modules and plugins.
Personal glossary
This is a great way of encouraging autonomous learning. It allows students to create their own word lists in different languages. It also comes with a quiz which allows students to test themselves. Note that you'll have to turn the My Moodle feature on for this to work. (See below).
Exabis E-portfolio
This is an excellent means of showcasing documents on a course. Possible language uses are:
Documents can be presented as a hyperlinked scheme, and can be viewed within Moodle or through an external link. See Chapter 10, Extended Activities for an example.
Moodle overview: Core modules
Here is a brief overview of the core modules, all of which appear in activities throughout the book. Modules are Moodle-speak for interactive activities. You add them by turning editing on once you're on a course page. Then you click on Add a resource... or Add an activity.... Some of them are very easy to set up, such as Chat, Choice, Forum, and Journal. Others will take a bit more concentration and time to set up. I've indicated the ease of setup with a star system for each activity.
Note
Ease of setup
*
Quite simple—quick and straightforward.
**
Moderately difficult
***
Fairly complex
The activities in each chapter are generally organized so that the easier ones come first.
Core modules
Module name
Description
Assignment
Students can submit an assignment online or via an attachment. Instructions for the assignment are posted in the activity description.
Book
Provides a way of organizing web pages into three levels of importance. For example, Main topics and subtopics.
Chat
A simple Chat module like MSN without the bells and whistles. Allows you to save chat transcripts.
Choice
A simple polling activity to gather votes for and against something. It's a good way of catching learners' attention, and can be used for voting on whether something is grammatically correct or as a fun quiz where students have to vote on what they think someone is saying in a recording they hear.
Database
A highly customizable, searchable database. Good for setting up lists of websites and repositories of work, for example.
Forum
Forum is an activity that allows a group of Moodle users to ask and answer questions. Users click on the Discussion topic and they can read and reply to messages written by other users.
Students can be given more or fewer powers to run discussions.
Glossary
A database shell which makes it easy to set up lexical glossaries, searchable lists of grammar entries, FAQs, and encyclopedia entries.
Hot Potatoes quiz
Allows you to import quizzes made in Hot Potatoes, a well-developed, free quiz program. See http://hotpot.uvic.ca/ for downloads and tutorials. If you have little time on your hands, this is a very easy way to start including quizzes in your Moodle. See the end of this chapter for more information.
Journal
Private pages. Good for keeping diaries and reflective comments. Only the student and teachers have access.
Label
Not really a module, but a useful device for setting out clear labels on your course page.
Lesson
A branched lesson. Users answer one question and are directed to subsequent questions depending on their answer. For example, if they get the first question wrong, they can redo it or go to an easier one. These are a bit tricky to set up, but are popular with students.
Quiz
Variety of task types which can be organized into a question bank.
Wiki
Web pages which can be edited by all users. Wikipedia is the best-known example. These are good for collaborative work, such as joint writing projects and task planning.
Workshop
Similar to Assignment, but submitted work can be peer reviewed before final submission. Teachers can present model assignments for students to assess before they write their own assignments.
Moodle overview: Add-on modules
This book uses twelve add-on modules and one add-on question type for Quiz. You don't need to add them to use the book, but I've chosen them because they help with language practice, and some of them, like NanoGong, make it much easier to record your voice and students' voices on Moodle web pages. The activities in the book always indicate whether an add-on module is used or not.
Here's a list and description of the add-on modules. The installation instructions are available as readme.txt files on the download page: http://moodle.org | Downloads | Modules and plugins. You'll need to get your administrator to download and install them. I've asterisked the ones I think are particularly useful for language teaching.
Add-on module
Description
FLV
This is a fairly sophisticated Flash player. While the Mediacenter (below) plays whatever you upload or point it to in a simple, attractive way, FLV has much greater choice of input type and allows you to edit the set-up page in ways which are useful for language learning. For example, you can turn sound off, remove the control panel, and change the screen size. You can link to YouTube videos and other video files on the Internet. You can also link to the user's web cam if it is turned on.
Lolipop ELP
This allows students to use the Language On Line Portfolio Project, which is documented at http://www.webcef.eu/?q=node/88. The Moodle add-on allows students to self-assess themselves using Common European Framework "can-do" statements for different language skills. They can also set language learning goals and submit evidence of learning for teachers to check.
* Mediacenter (Inwicast)
This allows teachers to create a very neat podcast center inside their Moodle. It does the same job as iTunes university does. More information at http://www.inwicast.com/en/.
Moodle Mindmap
This is a simple multi-layer mindmapping program. It doesn't allow you to embed images, audio or hyperlinks, but is useful for brainstorming writing projects and for developing vocabulary.
Mobile Quiz
This allows teachers to download quiz questions to students' mobile phones. This could be the way to motivate your students to do test questions!
* NanoGong
If you select just one add-on, make it this one. NanoGong is very easy to set up and to use. It allows you to record directly into Moodle and playback on Moodle. It doesn't work in all modules, but it does work in useful ones like Book, Web page, and Database. Go to http://gong.ust.hk/ for download for instructions and more information. Don't forget to agree to trust this certificate the first time you use it.
OUblog
The key difference between the Moodle Blog and the OUblog is that you can embed video on the OUblog.
OUwiki
Like the OUblog, this add-on allows you to embed video.
* Questionnaire
This is a customizable survey which can be very useful for getting feedback or opinions on various aspects of the course, or for getting students to write their own surveys and practice asking questions. You could also change the permissions so that students can write their own questions. See the Accounts section (in a bit) on roles and permissions.
Reader
This allows you to set up an extended reading program and then test students on the books afterwards. You can select your own readers and make your own quizzes.
Stamp collection
Stamps are tokens which you can give to students as a reward for their performance in Moodle assignments. This may be particularly appealing to younger learners.
* WebQuest
This is a structured web investigation. It's excellent for guiding students to do knowledge quests or sharpen their critical evaluation skills.
* Ordering task type for quiz
This is very useful for language learners: it adds one question type to the core Quiz module. It allows students to order parts of a whole. For example, words within a sentence, sentences within a paragraph, or a chronological succession of events.
