Category Archives: Moodle

Free talking picture dictionary for Moodle

Auto linking the dictionary

One of the features of the Moodle Glossary module is that it can be set to auto link to entries anywhere it find those entries in other text on Moodle pages (not PDFs or links to external pages). For example, if the Glossary module finds the word “dictionary” in a paragraph of text, it’ll automatically highlight it and place a link on it. When a learner clicks on the highlighted word, a pop-up window appears with the corresponding Glossary entry for “dictionary”.

Please note: Some of the text formatting in the exported talking picture dictionary is a bit messy but can easily be corrected in Moodle with the Glossary editor.

Download

Common Objects MILA Learning Content Cartridge

Instructions

Unzip the downloaded package and look for the file called, “exported_glossary_data_to_import_to_your_moodle.xml“
Upload the zip package to your Moodle course files directory.
Unzip the package and make sure the directory structure is as follows:
Create a new Glossary module instance on your course page.
In the Glossary module instance, at the top right of the screen, click on “Import entries”.
Browse to and select the “exported_glossary_data_to_import_to_your_moodle.xml” file on your computer and click on “Save changes”.
That’s it. You’ve just created a talking picture dictionary on your Moodle course. Feel free to edit and modify it in any way you please.

There are free apps to try out in your Moodle on the SWF Activity Module project downloads page.

Why use a Learning Management System for elearning?

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Many teachers and organisations are now experimenting with collections of free online platforms and systems by commercial service providers such as Google and Yahoo! to use in their teaching practices. Some of the more popular uses are things like encouraging learners to submit course work via email, using free online discussion forums, wikis, microblogging, and social networking sites. If all this is available for free, then why bother using a Learning Management System (LMS)?

One place for everything

In their first experiments with elearning, many teachers tend to build a collection of free commercial web services that are “one trick applications”, for example, Facebook or Edmodo for social networking, email or Google Docs for submitting written assignments, drop boxes or file sharing services for media files, Yahoo! Groups for discussion forums, and free test preparation sites. Using all these different services requires learners and teachers to create a number of user accounts, i.e. one for each service, and manage them all accordingly. Admins must keep track of teachers’ and learners’ online activities, and teachers must keep track of their learners’ right across the assortment of services and sites. From an organisational perspective this is clearly not an easy arrangement to administer and almost impossible to do on a medium or large scale.

Presumably, any organisation taking this approach with young learners would also have to get parents’ signatures on Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) agreements, or their equivalents in their respective countries, for each site or service used. Some governments and educational authorities are also prohibiting the use of some web sites and services by teachers and learners such as Facebook.

A well designed Learning Management System will have all the tools and services you need to create and manage user accounts, courses, social networks, news, announcements and messages, discussion groups, assignment and file submission systems, quizzes, tests and exams, presentations and lessons, grading and feedback, etc. in one convenient place, with one user account for each participant.

More coherently organised courses

An LMS allows administration, curriculum developers, course content authors and teachers to create courses with activities, assessment, etc., that are coherently organised and easy to follow. Courses and course content can be quickly and easily updated and adjusted and as such are a more responsive and adaptive approach to developing effective elearning programmes. Teachers and learners can follow a clear, concise timeline of activities and projects, look ahead to see what’s coming up and review past work for critical reflection, all in one place.

More appropriate types of roles for users

Most social networking sites are designed for optimising corporate marketing opportunities and gathering users’ personal information and encouraging disclosures of personal and private details, while most Content Management Systems (CMS) are designed for e-commerce and/or web publishing contexts and user accounts tend to reflect this. eLearning, and learning and teaching in general, have different requirements that can’t normally be met by most CMS’ or social networking sites. An LMS gives finer, more specific control over what groups of users and individual users can and can’t do on the system from the administrative level right down to learners and guests. For example we may want to enable some teachers and staff to edit activities and resources but not others, or we may want to enable some learners to be responsible as moderators and/or helpers for some discussion groups. Another frequently requested role is to allow parents to view their childrens’ grades and attendance. We may also want users’ roles to be different on different courses, for example making teachers learners on professional development courses.

Additionally, in a learning environment it is desirable to monitor learners’ actions and activities in order for teachers, mentors and sometimes even peers to be able to give guidance and feedback. In this respect, most CMS’ provide only the most basic user tracking since guidance, mentoring and feedback are not seen as a high priority.

Record keeping and management

A single centralised record keeping system is easier to manage, analyse and understand than a collection of commercial web services and sites with varying degrees of administrative, teacher and user access and data transparency. A well designed LMS will enable admins and teachers to look up individual users or groups to see their activities and analyse learning outcomes; Teachers can see their learners’ grades and learning outcomes, learners can see their own grades and learning outcomes, and curriculum developers and course content authors can see the interactions and learning outcomes both in individual case studies and in aggregated analyses. Want to know how effective your resources, activities and courses are? – Look up the data, learners’ activities, and the learning outcomes.

More coherent communication

Keeping channels of communication open is an essential part of running any organisation smoothly and responsively. An LMS allows admins and teachers to send messages or make announcements to groups of learners, teachers and individuals. Ongoing channels of communication are easier to find and respond to, and to review. Teachers can provide feedback in relation to particular assignments, activities and learning outcomes for individuals and groups. Teachers can communicate with each other, and learners can also be enabled to do this, in a variety of synchronous (e.g. chat, VoIP “internet telephony” and web conferencing) and asynchronous (e.g. private messaging, discussion forums and assignment feedback) modes. Planning, co-ordinating, and collaborating on activities suddenly becomes easier.

Assessment tools

One of the better known strengths of LMS’ is that they can reduce a lot of the administrative work involved in assessment. Some types of summative assessment can be completely automated with self marking quizzes, tests and exams so learners can get their results immediately and teachers only have to analyse the results. There’s less marking to do and no need to enter the results into a database; it’s already done for you. An added bonus is that it can greatly reduce the amount of photocopying your organisation does. LMS’ may also include sophisticated analytical tools to examine test results and assessments to look for areas where the quality of activities, learning resources, curricula, and learning and teaching approaches could be optimised or improved. Additionally, a well designed LMS enables teachers to provide consistent, frequent formative assessment in the form of written or recorded feedback, exchanges of messages, VoIP sessions and learning reviews. Learners can build learning portfolios of compositions, projects and learner generated multimedia for more sophisticated assessments that are more reflective of real world abilities and practices.

Integration with 3rd party software and web services

For smaller organisations that can’t usually justify the expense of running their own dedicated web conferencing systems, many 3rd party web conferencing service providers offer plugins for the more widely used LMS’ so that the LMS can be used to manage user accounts and conferencing sessions along with access to subsequent recordings of the conferences. That means that, for a fraction of the cost, you can provide online classes from within your LMS. All the necessary co-ordination between the conferencing service and the LMS courses, groups, and learners and teachers can be taken care of simply, quickly and easily.

Conclusion

These are just a few examples of the benefits that LMS’ can have for educational departments and organisations of any size. There are many more that won’t be immediately apparent until you start getting more deeply involved in running online communities of learning and teaching. What are you waiting for?

Using the C-Test generator for self testing in extensive reading programmes

Why extensive reading programmes?

In short, extensive reading:

allows learners to meet the language in its natural context and see how it works in extended discourse beyond the language met in textbooks.
builds vocabulary. When learners read a lot, they meet thousands of words and lexical (word) patterns time and time again which helps them master them and predict what vocabulary and grammar may come next.
helps learners to build reading speed and reading fluency which allows them to process the language more automatically leaving space in memory for other things
builds confidence, motivation, enjoyment and a love of reading which makes learners more effective language users. It also helps lower any anxieties about language learning the learners may have.
allows learners to read or listen to a lot of English at or about their own ability level so they can develop good reading and listening habits.
helps learners get a sense of how grammatical patterns work in context. Textbooks and other study materials introduce language patterns but typically they don’t appear often enough in a variety of contexts to facilitate a deep understanding of how the patterns work.

Source: ER Foundation’s Guide to Extensive Reading handbook (PDF).

There has been a lot of research into extensive reading programmes for both first and second language acquisition in children and adults, which have given promising results. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the results by TESL and TEFL practitioners. A notable study was Dr. Patsy Lightbown’s New Brunswick Experiment* in which school children in French Canada where given 150 minutes (one 30 minute session per day) of extensive reading in English per week in place of traditional classroom instruction. It appears to indicate that learners can indeed “Do it themselves” and in some areas of language use, significantly outperformed classroom instructed learners, although the paper calls for further investigation.

The Extensive Reading Foundation provides help, advice, research evidence and reviews of graded readers and other books for anyone who’s interested in trying out extensive reading with their learners. A good place to start is with the ER Foundation’s Guide to Extensive Reading handbook (PDF).

*Lightbown, P. Can They Do It Themselves? A Comprehension Based ESL Course for Young Children, Comprehension based Second Language Teaching, by Courchêne, Glidden, St. John and Thérien (eds.), University of Ottawa Press, 1992.

Why use the C-Test MILA in extensive reading programmes?

It’s important and motivating for learners to be able to assess how much they are learning from their activities, i.e. how much progress they are making. Some learners (and teachers) can be sceptical about the value of extensive reading and reading for pleasure without a dictionary, grammar exercises or reading comprehension questions. The following is an attempt to address this issue constructively by allowing learners to do assessments specifically related to the texts that they are reading without changing the basic nature/procedure of extensive reading activities and requiring little, if any, extra input from teachers. An added benefit is that learners and teachers can easily monitor learners’ reading and overall progress from the c-test results in Moodle’s grade book.

How does it work?

Here’s one possible scenario for using the C-Test MILA for extensive reading. Learners:

pick 3 paragraphs randomly from the text/book
generate 3 c-tests by copying and pasting the 3 paragraphs into 3 instances of the C-Test MILA
attempt the 3 generated c-tests; the c-test results and paragraphs of text are stored in Moodle’s grade book
read the entire text/book over a period of hours/days/weeks
repeat steps 1-3 with different randomly selected paragraphs from the text/book
compare their results from before reading and after reading; Has their performance improved?

Additionally, if a learner scores particularly poorly on their initial attempts on the generated c-tests before they read, they may be well advised to postpone attempting to read that particular text until they’re “ready” for it and selecting an easier, more suitable text in the meantime. Learners can quickly generate as many c-tests as they need until they can find a book or text at a suitable level for them and that they’re interested in reading.

If your school has a library of graded readers, it would be considered fair use in most countries, i.e. within copyright law, to scan and copy paragraphs from each book and set up a selection of ready made c-tests for learners to take.

How to deploy the C-Test generator MILA

Example: How to set up the C-Test generator in Moodle. On the desired course page:

Create a new instance of the SWF Activity Module
Write the title, description, etc.
Select the C-Test MILA
In FlashVars Learning Interaction Data > Name, write “input”
In FlashVars Learning Interaction Data > Value, write “true”

FlashVars Learning Interaction Data

Click “Save and display” and test it with a suitable paragraph or two of text.

C-Test MILA Demo

There’s a demo set up on the Multimedia Interactive Learning Applications course on my R&D Moodle (login as a guest). Find a text to test yourself with (perhaps from Project Gutenberg?) and copy and paste it into the C-Test user input reading level test generator in the C-Test topic section (#11). There’s also some ready made c-tests there to try out.

Listen and select Multimedia Interactive Learning Application

What is it the Listen and select Multimedia Interactive Learning Application (MILA)?

Listen and select Multimedia Interactive Learning Application

It’s software for learning English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) written in Flash. When deployed in Moodle 1.9 using the SWF Activity Module, it has access to Moodle’s grade book and can save learners’ grades as well as other useful information. It can also be deployed in other learning management systems (LMS), in standalone web pages, and in content management systems (CMS) if you have some basic knowledge of HTML.

What does it do?

It loads multimedia learning content cartridges and uses the images and audio in them to generate simple, intuitive, interactive game-like activities. From a learner’s perspective, they:

Look at the four images
Listen to the audio recording
Select the image which most closely corresponds to the audio
If the learner selects incorrectly, they can try again until they find the correct image
Go on to the next four images
Repeat until all the images and audio have been matched

The Listen and select MILA automatically generates the activity and “shuffles” the images into random order each time it’s played. That way, each attempt at the activity is slightly different so learners can’t memorise the order they come in or remember any of the answers by their position. In other words, the only way to successfully select the correct image is to match it to the corresponding audio.

Images and audio from the Common Objects multimedia learning content cartridge.

Since the multimedia learning content cartridges that it loads are external and interchangeable, the Listen and select MILA can be reused to generate any number of activities with different cartridges. For example, an elementary English course (A1) may include vocabulary related to the alphabet, numbers, phone numbers, jobs, flats and houses, food, times and dates, and common verb expressions. You can deploy an instance of the Listen and select MILA for each of the vocabulary sets or even break the vocabulary sets up into smaller, “bite size” activities and spread them out over the course of the week.

The cartridges themselves are open format, i.e. separate, reusable media files, which means they can be edited to create new combinations of images and audio, and with a little knowledge of SMIL XML (easy to learn) and some basic audio and image editing skills, you can create new cartridges of your own. Additionally, the images and audio in the cartridges can be used in other pages and activities in your CMS or LMS, for example in Moodle’s Glossary activity module to create picture and audio dictionaries.

When deployed in Moodle, the Listen and select MILA records the number of correct selections as a percentage of the total, the time taken to complete the activity, and the total number of images in the activity in Moodle’s grade book. The SWF Activity Module generates progress charts from Moodle’s grade book entries that show graphs of previous attempts over time, which can encourage learners to develop mastery of the activities.

Where can I try it out?

You can see a working demo of it deployed in a course in Matt’s Moodle here. Log in as a guest and go to section 5 of the MILAs course. Guest users cannot save their grades in Moodle’s grade book. Please contact Matt if you’d like to have a free and confidential learner account on the course so you can see how the progress charts work.

How can I get it for my school’s or organisation’s site?

You can buy a licenced copy of the Listen and select MILA by contacting Matt directly. All MILAs are licensed under a generous 30 year agreement which allows you to deploy as many instances as you like from the specified domain or website as well as any local testing servers or intranets you or your organisation might use. They also come with a free Common Objects starter multimedia learning content cartridge to get you started. Licences include updates, enhancements and bug fixes. Full details of the licence agreement are available on the MILAs demonstration course.

Using the Moodle Chat activity module for learning

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The Moodle chat activity module is a simple, basic chatroom platform specifically designed for learning and closely integrated with Moodle courses. Learners can chat, teachers can monitor and participate. Chats can be whole class or in small groups. Moodle saves the transcripts of all chat sessions. This means that teachers and learners can copy transcripts into other activities so that learners can analyse and reflect on their performance, correct errors and devise learning strategies to improve their future performances.

Learners can:

Role play dialogues
Ask for and give informal help
Collaborate on problem solving
Collaborate on projects
Do information gap and jigsaw activities
Play guessing games
Study transcripts for error correction, communication content analysis, etc.

Using chat

Why use Moodle chat when there are so many free online services that offer internet telephony, video and file transfer capabilities? Simply because Moodle chat rooms give you control over who can enter and interact with your learners. In order to participate in a particular chatroom, participants must be enrolled on that particular course. More importantly, you and learners have access to chat transcripts and since each chat is integrated with a course, it’s easier to keep track of learners’ participation for support, assessment, grading, etc.

Learner support and study groups

Some students find that online classes and courses can seem isolated. Having a strong social presence within a learning community is vital for cultivating learner engagement and reinforcing their cognitive presence. Additionally, as final exams and dealines approach, learners’ anxiety and stress levels rise and feelings of isolation can increase. Chat sessions provide much needed social contact and support for learners who are stressed and/or in difficulty. Learners can get the support they need from teachers and peers, and chat transcripts are a useful record of others’ help and advice. Something that we don’t normally get from face to face contact.

Creating study groups

An important factor in productive chat sessions is in limiting the number of participants. Some Human Behaviourism researchers claim that the maximum coherent interactive social group has up to five members at any one time and that more than five members becomes difficult to manage. With Moodle chatrooms it’s easy to create a single chat activity that automatically breaks large classes up into smaller assigned groups, each with their own sub-chatroom. A chatroom can be entirely separate or learners can be allowed to see but not participate in other groups’ chat.

Initiating new groups with review assignments

For learners who haven’t worked together before, it’s a good idea to get them started by assigning each one a review topic to prepare ahead of the chat session. You could assign the same topic for all learners in a group, e.g. for critical analysis, or you may want to assign different areas of a topic to create information gap activities.

The need for mediators

In online chat sessions, it’s easy for learners to “lurk”, i.e. watch without participating. This is where transcripts can be useful for assessment and for coaching learners towards more productive and collaborative participation but it’s also necessary for someone to be responsible for encouraging everyone to participate and draw lurkers into the conversation. Teachers can monitor chatrooms or individual learners can be assigned the role of mediator.

Encouraging learners to formulate questions

While it’s often necessary for teachers to provide initial questions to get conversations going, chat sessions can be more engaging and productive if learners are encouraged to think analytically and critically and formulate their own questions. This keeps chats from turning into teacher led question and answer sessions and encourages greater cognitive engagement in learners.

Using chat for tutorial review

Chatrooms are an ideal medium for tutorial reviews with individual learners. Teachers can encourage learners to be more responsible and reflective by discussing their submitted assignments and projects. Learners can review the transcript afterwards for further reflection and maybe even resubmission.