4/24/2007

Moodle and the Glossary

Yet another great block to add to courses is the Glossary block. You can add terms to the glossary and set it to display random, or most recent, plus some other options. Basically, every time a student goes to the Moodle course they will see the glossary term or key concept. It's like setting them up to learn by osmosis.

Obviously ESL and language courses can benefit tremendously form this feature, but anyone that ha key concepts can apply. I like it because students can get fresh content every time the page loads and they can effortlessly learn vocabulary, jargon, and the like. They may of course, also go into the glossary and look up the other words, perhaps to study for a quiz.

RSS and Moodle (or your website, blog, etc.)

Another great option for Moodle and anything web-based is RSS. Using RSS, you can basically post headlines in Moodle courses or on your website, blog, whatever, that update themselves.

In a Geography course for international students I posted the National Geographic RSS and my students really got excited. The headline took them to a photo of a crocodile with a man's hand in its mouth. Talk about a conversation topic. I am also using it to post the daily local news.

If you are really ambitious you can create your own RSS, google it, and go for it. All I know is that this is an amazing technology that let's us stay up-to-date on virtually any topic (I use the surf report). For Moodlers, it's easy, just add an RSS block in your courses.

Hot Potato and Moodle, a pefect match

Hot Potato and Moodle work great together. You can quickly make quizzes in Hot Potato and import them to Moodle, check it out. You can also import the questions from Hot Potato to Moodle and add them to Moodle quizzes from there. Either way, these two pieces of software make quizzes easy as pie. Oh yeah and Moodle grades them for you too.

Audacity- the free, high-tech mp3 recorder

Just what the title says. You can have your students prepare presentations, practice pronunciation, record your own lectures, and make podcasts (assuming you have a place to post) all with the free, wonderful open source software Audacity. Whoever is behind this, thank you.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

In my case, our ESL department is toying with speaking homework and recorded pronunciation practice. I've heard others speak of a spoken journal. Now there is a free, and easy way to give students speaking homework. Look's like spoken word and oral histories are back.