Proposals for GloCall 2008

(1) How to maximize Moodle's quiz module

Moodle's quiz module allows teachers to create a large variety of interactive quizzes quite easily. The built-in quiz editor offers a wide range of quiz options: you can choose whether or not to set a time limit, to shuffle questions, and to use the adaptive mode, just to name a few. With the editor, you can easily incorporate various web-based materials and resources into questions/feedbacks. Also, the quiz module creates Question bank, a database of questions, which allows you to choose a different set of questions to make a new quiz, and to prepare similar questions with different difficulty levels.

In this presentation, I will focus on just two of the available question types -- multiple-choice and matching -- (1) to give an overview of the quiz options, (2) to show how to incorporate images or animation, audio, pop-up hints, and tutorial slides into questions/feedbacks, and (3) to give some tips on how to organize questions so that you can easily re-use them within a single course and in different courses. Some specific quizzes for learning or testing vocabulary and grammar will be given to show how these quizzes and the results/feedbacks look like.


(2)Teaching with web-based tools and materials

I teach a course called “Computer Communication” at a university, where students are supposed to learn research and presentations using computers and the Internet, and English. Students taking this course tend to have only limited experience with computers and find it quite hard to communicate in English. There can be only few who are used to low-context communication (even in their native language), critical about what they hear or read, or interested in finding something new for themselves.

My goals in teaching this course are (1) to make them feel more comfortable using computers and the Internet, and reading/writing in English, (2) to help them learn to organize and interpret information they have gathered, and (3) to encourage them to look for better ways to express what they mean.

In this presentation, I will explain what has been done to achieve these goals. In addition to using Moodle for organizing resources and activities, I have integrated other web-based tools and materials into activities, including online dictionaries, YouTube, Blogger and Google Docs. Such activities are expected to encourage the students to search for interesting and useful information for themselves, and facilitate them to keep logs of what they have found and publish their work effectively. Besides, it does not take much time to prepare these activities. I will also mention step-by-step approaches I have taken to show how to use these tools.