About the Book

Engaging online language learning activities using the Moodle platform

• A recipe book for creating language activities using Moodle 1.9
• Get the most out of Moodle 1.9's features to create enjoyable, useful language learning activities
• Create an online language learning center that includes reading, writing, speaking, listening, vocabulary, and grammar activities
• Enhance your activities to make them visually attractive, and make the most of audio and video activities

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.

This book breaks down the core components of a typical language syllabus - speaking, pronunciation, listening, reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, and assessment - and shows you how use Moodle 1.9 to create complete, usable activities that practice 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.

What you will learn from this book?

• Look at a variety of activities that help students to learn words, review and recycle vocabulary, and learn different ways of keeping vocabulary records.
• Help students get better at their speaking ability using the add-on nanogong recorder, which illustrates activities that look at pronunciation, intonation, fluency, stress, and discussions.
• Create a wide range of activities for presenting grammar, practicing its use, and keeping grammar records.
• Embed flash audio players and YouTube video on your Moodle to make language learning more fun.
• Encourage students to read and interact with texts using Moodle and learn an activity on extended reading.
• Set up collaborative writing tasks and tasks with different types of feedback to help students to structure sentences to create longer texts, build short stories using key vocabulary, and more.
• Make your materials look more engaging and attractive by enhancing their visual design.
• Consider the importance of roles, groups, and outcomes as well as the add-ons to make the most of Moodle for language teaching.
• Create activities that help students learn and practice to write effectively online.
• Set up useful listening activities using student-made recordings, forum discussions and authentic texts, which motivate students to listen.
• Help students to interact with listening texts through tasks such as matching, gap-fill, text prediction, and ordering events.
• Benefit from Moodle's gradebook statistics to improve your own language tests.
• Make your students language learning experience more effective by checking the quality of the text, images, and audio and learn the importance of clear navigation paths.

Approach
The author's experience as a teacher enables him to combine a simple, descriptive how-to approach with enthusiastic insights into the rich potential of Moodle for creating engaging, useful language learning activities. The book is based on Moodle 1.9 and gives clear instructions with lots of screenshots. There are dozens of examples of activities that you can use to create your own online activities.

Who this book is written for?
This book is written for teachers, trainers, and course planners with little or no experience of Moodle who want create their own language learning activities.

About the Author
Jeff Stanford is from London, UK, and has worked in over 20 different countries. He has more than 20 years experience as a language teacher and teacher trainer, which he has applied with abundant enthusiasm to ICT for the last ten years. He is a portfolio worker and each of the strands of his professional life have contributed to this book: as an associate tutor on the MA TEFL course at Leicester University; as a communication skills tutor; as a web site designer; and as a teacher trainer. Since doing a diploma in Interactive Multimedia in 2002 he's been particularly keen on demystifying technology, and helping teachers make the most of the rich world of internet language learning applications. He has been working with Moodle for the last 5 years, setting up Moodle installations for schools and companies and advising on best practice for administrators and teachers. You can visit his free Moodle try-out site at moodleflair.com.

Table Of Contents

• Preface
• Chapter 1: What Does Moodle Offer Language Teachers?
• Chapter 2: Getting Started with Moodle
• Chapter 3: Vocabulary Activities
• Chapter 4: Speaking Activities
• Chapter 5: Grammar Activities
• Chapter 6: Reading Activities
• Chapter 7: Writing Activities
• Chapter 8: Listening Activities
• Chapter 9: Assessment
• Chapter 10: Extended Activities
• Index