Hi,
I have added this post to the moodle lounge but I am posting it here too just in case not everybody uses the lounge.
I'm hoping someone can help me....
I started work on creating my own online language courses some time ago but have been slowed down too much by learning about moodle. Regardless, I have spoken at length with a school I help out from time to time and they have asked me for some help. They are getting involved in a project to help teach African, East European and Asian immigrants English, adults in particular, but also children. The aim is to help them be able to survive and work in an English environment.
I have had to admit that I am not going to be able to complete even my first course soon enough for it to be of any help, so I am now charged with finding an alternative solution.
Does anybody have, or know of, moodle (or, I suppose, other format) based English language courses that are available free or at a low cost? This is a non-profit project, so has a tight budget.
If so I would be most grateful to hear from anyone who can help or guide me in the right direction. Please reply either here or by personal message (if confidential).
Thank you.
Brian
Hi Brian,
elearning can be a lot easier than people with a background in traditional education think. Rather than transcribing activities that optimised for book, paper and classroom learning, it's more productive to look into the social constructivist theory of learning, the theory on which Moodle is based (it was Martin Dougiamas' PhD thesis).
There's plenty of help and information out there and here's a few links to get you started:
Book for Second Language Teaching with Moodle 1.9 by Jeff Stanford: http://matbury.com/wordpress/2010/07/25/book-review-moodle-1-9-for-second-language-teaching/
Presentation on blended learning at MIT: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/765
A great presentation on some very simple but very effective computer assisted learning techniques (this one could be right up your street): http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
Extract from Barbara Gross Davis' book "Tools for Teaching" (1993 edition - the new 2009 one's much better): http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/collaborative.html
The 2009 book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tools-Teaching-Barbara-Gross-Davis/dp/0787965677/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1285412679&sr=1-1
I'm also developing some time-saving resources for learning English as a second/foreign language that go with the SWF Activity Module: http://code.google.com/p/swf-activity-module/ It's not ready yet but you'll soon be able to license software and multimedia resources (thousands of text, images and audio files) that are preconfigured so that deploying them is only a matter of uploading the media file packages and then deploying instances of the Flash based software. It's very mix and match and also editable, so teachers can create their own resources and activities too, for maximum flexibility. If you hunt around my blog for Flash or elearning, you'll find a few articles about them: http://blog.matbury.com/
Happy reading and I hope this helps!
All the best,
Matt
elearning can be a lot easier than people with a background in traditional education think. Rather than transcribing activities that optimised for book, paper and classroom learning, it's more productive to look into the social constructivist theory of learning, the theory on which Moodle is based (it was Martin Dougiamas' PhD thesis).
There's plenty of help and information out there and here's a few links to get you started:
Book for Second Language Teaching with Moodle 1.9 by Jeff Stanford: http://matbury.com/wordpress/2010/07/25/book-review-moodle-1-9-for-second-language-teaching/
Presentation on blended learning at MIT: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/765
A great presentation on some very simple but very effective computer assisted learning techniques (this one could be right up your street): http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
Extract from Barbara Gross Davis' book "Tools for Teaching" (1993 edition - the new 2009 one's much better): http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/collaborative.html
The 2009 book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tools-Teaching-Barbara-Gross-Davis/dp/0787965677/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1285412679&sr=1-1
I'm also developing some time-saving resources for learning English as a second/foreign language that go with the SWF Activity Module: http://code.google.com/p/swf-activity-module/ It's not ready yet but you'll soon be able to license software and multimedia resources (thousands of text, images and audio files) that are preconfigured so that deploying them is only a matter of uploading the media file packages and then deploying instances of the Flash based software. It's very mix and match and also editable, so teachers can create their own resources and activities too, for maximum flexibility. If you hunt around my blog for Flash or elearning, you'll find a few articles about them: http://blog.matbury.com/
Happy reading and I hope this helps!
All the best,
Matt
Thanks Matt,
Yes, I actually bought the moodle for 2nd language teaching last week, along with one on designing themes too. As for the rest - it looks like I have a lot of reading to do!!
The post, though, was a hunt for ready-made resources available now because this is something I've been asked to find. There's no way I can complete the course I'm working on even before xmas, and even then it's a course for a set level student and wouldn't really be suitable. I was kinda hoping someone sold complete courses so that I don't have to stop creating my own course in order to edit one for the school.
Funny, I thought there would be a demand for schools etc who wanted to buy courses, and therefore a supply of such, but I haven't found evidence of either recently.
Anyhow, as regards my own course, I think the info you provided will be useful, so thanks.
Brian
Yes, I actually bought the moodle for 2nd language teaching last week, along with one on designing themes too. As for the rest - it looks like I have a lot of reading to do!!
The post, though, was a hunt for ready-made resources available now because this is something I've been asked to find. There's no way I can complete the course I'm working on even before xmas, and even then it's a course for a set level student and wouldn't really be suitable. I was kinda hoping someone sold complete courses so that I don't have to stop creating my own course in order to edit one for the school.
Funny, I thought there would be a demand for schools etc who wanted to buy courses, and therefore a supply of such, but I haven't found evidence of either recently.
Anyhow, as regards my own course, I think the info you provided will be useful, so thanks.
Brian
You're welcome Brian,
The biggest vendors of EFL/ESL books are Pearson Longman, Oxford University Press and Cambridge. I believe that they are all producing various types of content for web and computer based language learning and I think OUP even produces SCORM packages.
You could check out their websites, brochures and catalogues to see what they have on offer at the moment.
The biggest vendors of EFL/ESL books are Pearson Longman, Oxford University Press and Cambridge. I believe that they are all producing various types of content for web and computer based language learning and I think OUP even produces SCORM packages.
You could check out their websites, brochures and catalogues to see what they have on offer at the moment.