Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook

Silvina P. Hillar

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Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook

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Overview

Table of Contents

The Author

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Packed with recipes to help you use Moodle effectively to teach English
Create a different atmosphere to help students improve their writing skills using Moodle
Implement different techniques in the teaching of reading comprehension, writing, and composition using a variety of resources from the free and open source software available
Enhance the writing activities created for students by embedding Twitter & Facebook into Moodle

Book Details

Language : English
Paperback : 304 pages [ 235mm x 191mm ]
Release Date : July 2010
ISBN : 1849510881
ISBN 13 : 978-1-849510-88-2
Author(s) : Silvina P. Hillar
Topics and Technologies : All Books, Cookbooks, e-Learning, Moodle, Open Source

Preface
Chapter 1: Connecting Ideas
Chapter 2: Matching Pictures and Text
Chapter 3: Looking at Things from Different Perspectives
Chapter 4: Defining Types of Sentences
Chapter 5: Creating Stories using Twitter and Facebook
Chapter 6: Improving Your Students' Writing
Chapter 7: Comparing using Venn Diagrams
Chapter 8: Composing New Sceneries
Chapter 9: Working with Mind Maps and Tree Diagrams
Chapter 10: Preparing a Discussion Clock
Index

Preface

Chapter 1: Connecting Ideas
- Introduction
- Matching sentences
- Unjumbling and connecting sentences
- Using Twitter and Facebook for a survey
- Brainstorming ideas using Forums
- Answering a quiz designed in a Lesson
- Empty book, great story: upload pictures from Microsoft Word
- Connecting stairs: Uploading drawings from Microsoft Word
- Linking to websites and writing about an endangered animal

Chapter 2: Matching Pictures and Text
- Introduction
- Picturing comprehension
- Matching text to speech bubbles of comic strips
- Picture paragraph matching
- Sceneries and possible stories through flowcharts
- Working with paintings—Salvador Dali's art
- Choosing a book by its cover
- Advising posters
- Cooking recipes

Chapter 3: Looking at Things from Different Perspectives
- Introduction
- Becoming a well-known character
- Understanding secondary characters
- Adding technology to a story
- Statues can think
- Changing an adventure
- Old age versus childhood
- Beauty versus ugliness
- Curious characters

Chapter 4: Defining Types of Sentences
- Introduction
- Embedding videos, games, and matching the correct topic sentence
- Writing detailed sentences according to the topic sentence
- Multiple choice: choose the correct concluding sentence
- Mixing paragraphs
- Selecting the correct sentences
- Adding detailed sentences
- Writing topics and concluding sentences
- Hamburger paragraph: writing a composition using three types of sentences

Chapter 5: Creating Stories using Twitter and Facebook
- Introduction
- Debating a topic
- Cause-and-effect diagram, Fishbone, or Ishikawa diagram technique
- Positive and negative points list
- Play the reporter
- Writing a story guessing facts
- Writing a very short play using text messages
- Chain composition
- How to summarize information

Chapter 6: Improving Your Students' Writing
- Introduction
- Cubing technique: Describe
- Cubing technique: Compare
- Cubing technique: Associate
- Cubing technique: Analyse
- Cubing technique: Apply
- Cubing technique: Argue
- Rolling a cube
- How to correct this essay

Chapter 7: Comparing using Venn Diagrams
- Introduction
- Summer holidays versus winter holidays—drawing Venn diagrams using Open Office Drawing
- Living in the country versus living in an
- overcrowded city—drawing Venn diagrams with clip art from Microsoft Word
- Being famous versus being unknown—drawing Venn diagrams with SmartDraw software
- Having a healthy lifestyle versus bad habits—completing a Venn diagram using the classtools.net website
- Famous coincidences—drawing Venn diagrams of Abraham Lincoln and John Fitzgerald Kennedy using Paint
- Comparing different types of pollution—drawing Venn diagrams using Microsoft Visio 2007
- Types of students—drawing Venn diagrams using Edraw Max
- Puzzles—placing adjectives and sentences in a Venn diagram according to the description of personal possessions

Chapter 8: Composing New Sceneries
- Introduction
- Updating a fairy tale—using a database to guide writing activity
- Changing a poem into a cartoon—using resources from Web 2.0
- Listening to a poem and writing another end to it
- Imagining that your house is a palace
- Superheroes have other powers—creating your own hero using tools from Web 2.0
- Flying shoes—creating an advertisement using animoto.com
- Becoming your idol—using Quandary 2 in Moodle
- Creating a writing activity

Chapter 9: Working with Mind Maps and Tree Diagrams
- Introduction
- Pictures in mind maps—using Buzan's iMindMap V4
- Adding data to pictures—creating a mind map using MindMeister
- Providing a situation to a story—drawing a mind map using Draw Anywhere
- Creating mind maps using resources from Web 2.0
- Creating a tree diagram using Microsoft Word
- Pictures in a tree diagram—creating a tree diagram using creately.com
- Completing a tree diagram comparing two people using my.lovelycharts.com
- Comparing the Flintstones and the
- Simpsons—using cacoo.com to create a tree diagram

Chapter 10: Preparing a Discussion Clock
- Introduction
- How to prepare a discussion clock—words to cover different viewpoints
- Writing from a viewpoint—using tiny URLs in the discussion clock
- Picturing the clock diagram—adding images
- Music in the clock diagram—embedding MP3 files to our Moodle course
- Just words—using a target diagram to create a discussion clock and creating a story out of it
- Questions in the clock diagram—writing a newspaper article
- Correcting through a clock diagram
- Designing a discussion clock in order to create an aircraft using resources from Web 2.0

Index

Silvina P. Hillar

Silvina P. Hillar has been teaching English since 1993. She has always had a great interest in teaching writing and composing techniques, and has made a lot of research on this subject. She is an English Teacher, a Certified Legal Translator (English/Spanish) and has a Post Degree in Education (graduated with Honors). She has been working in several schools and institutes with native English speaking students and as an independent consultant for many international companies as an interpreter, translator and e-learning activities developer. She has always had a passion for technological devices concerning education. Former videos and cassettes were a must in her teaching lessons, computer was and still is present. Her brother Gastón C. Hillar designed some programs and games for her teaching. Lately, she is teaching using Moodle and the Web 2.0. She believes that one of the most amazing challenges in education is bridging the gap between classic education and modern technologies. She has been doing a lot of research on multimedia assets which enhance the teaching and learning through VLE platforms. She tries to embed the learning of students through new resources which are appealing and innovative for them. Thus, multimedia stimulates the different thinking skills as well as multiple intelligences.

This book will spark off ideas in you and motivate you to try them out with your own classes

Sample chapters

You can view our sample chapters and prefaces of this title on PacktLib or download sample chapters in PDF format.

Find your book in our support section to find errata and to download code samples.

What you will learn from this book

Create prewriting activities such as matching or unjumbling among others using Hot Potatoes or Moodle Quizzes
Develop a writing atmosphere for students to be creative bearing in mind Multiple Intelligences theory
Perform a quandary maze using Quandary 2 and make students write according to their choices
Display videos or images in the Moodle course as prewriting activities
Embed social networks in the Moodle course and design interactive activities
Insert management techniques in the teaching of writing and composing to enhance the students' learning experience
Design and upload different mind maps, Venn diagrams, or tree diagrams in the Moodle course
Use listening comprehension activities as prewriting ones
Inspire students to change a writing style into another one
Change sceneries of classical stories, superheroes to create new ones or enhance them

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In Detail

Connecting the ideas of students is one of the most difficult tasks to carry out in the teaching process. Performing these types of tasks through Moodle will help you overcome complex situations while you teach. If you are looking for a guide that will show you how to improve your skills in using Moodle, as well as enhance your way of teaching in virtual classrooms, your search ends right here.

This cookbook provides a practical, step-by-step guide to building a complete reading comprehension, writing, and composition course in Moodle 1.9 starting with simple activities and ending with complex ones. It covers many features and techniques in order to allow you to organize your ideas to improve writing using Moodle as a virtual learning platform.

This book begins with simple activities in order to enhance students' writing, such as connecting activities developed in different ways either using Moodle or free and open source software available in the Web 2.0. Then, it moves into matching images and different pieces of writing; it shows how to import different pictures to the Moodle course in different ways. It caters for a great variety of images that will brighten the creativity of students.

Then reading comprehension is explored from the characters' point of view; students should explore the reading in such a way to become part of it and write as if they were part of the story.

Twitter and Facebook social networks are embedded in the Moodle course in order to invent stories, create group works, and create social on fashion interaction hand in hand with the virtual classroom. There are step-by-step activities involving these websites and inserting Ishikawa's management technique in order to enhance group writing.

Once you have reached this point of the book there are other writing techniques explored such as mathematical association to writing, cube technique, discussion clock, mind mapping, and tree diagrams among others. A step-by-step guide is provided for creating these techniques, uploading them into the Moodle course, and creating the writing activity.

The book covers writing sentences, poems, songs, descriptions, compositions, essays, articles, cartoons, ads, and creating and describing superheroes.

Achieve outstanding results with ready-to-use recipes for writing and composing holding hands with Moodle 1.9 in the Web 2.0 Era

Approach

This book follows a cookbook style, which will help you achieve outstanding results using ready-to-use recipes for reading comprehension, writing, and composition holding hands with Moodle 1.9 in the Web 2.0 Era.

Each recipe is unique; some deal with similar teaching techniques, but they show how to develop the same technique using different software, situations, or topics. Images, videos, poems, songs, artists, classic stories, cartoons, superheroes, painting, the environment, and comics are inserted into the Moodle course, in order to be used as either prewriting or writing activities.

Who this book is for

If you are an English teacher who wants to discover practical, funny, and engaging activities to insert in your course, this is a perfectly designed book for you. It will help you to use different techniques in the teaching of reading comprehension, writing, and composition using a great variety of resources from the free and open source software available in the Web and interesting websites as well as social networks. You need basic experience with Moodle 1.9 or 1.9.5, as well as installation and configuration procedures.