Packt Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook 304pages software manual

Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook - 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

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

<b>What you will learn from this book :</b>
- 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

<b>Who this book is written for</b>
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.