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I am not particularly creative, but I had fun using the glossary for:
- book reviews (with a picture of the cover from one of the big book ordering sites)
- biographies of people in the field (in our case, we did photographers--they added a link for more information and a link to their favorite picture)
- tutorials for photoshop (they uploaded their created image, linked to the tutorial, and gave it a rating for quality)
I hope to be inspired myself! Thanks for opening this discussion!
atw
Great idea.
I believe that if you had used the export entries in the glossaries before resetting the course, you could then import those entries back into the new course. That's how they are shared in the Glossary Exchange in the Moodle Exchange course.
Paula Clough
Jeff, I have had that problem with wikis but haven't tried it yet with glossaries.
One work around for glossaries that you have had students add to is to export the entries to a file and then after the reset of your class you can import the entries back in. I am not sure if comments will follow the export of entries or not... haven't experimented with that yet. This process will not bring photos with it though.
Paula Clough
I have really enjoyed working reading through this creative list. I have pulled them into a glossary of glossary ideas to use with my teachers. They can use the ideas and add their own. I am attaching the items here in case any of you would like to use it with your teachers.
Sorry the pictures won't follow the entries.
I will also post it in the Moodle Exchange.
Paula Clough
Thanks so much for your Glossary_of_Glossary_Ideas.xml
And it's given me another idea for using a Glossary. At the moment I'm running a teacher training course in French, Apprendre Moodle, and I've been finding it difficult to get the participants interested in Glossaries so I'm going to give them your Glossary of Glossary Ideas to translate into French (many of the people speak English) and to add ideas of their own. I'll let you know if it works.
Cheers,
Glenys
Glenys,
Yes please use and let me know how it goes.
Sounds like fun.
Have you looked at the Moodle Exchange for ideas too? You might direct them there, also. If they find anything they like, you could lead them through the process of importing entries too.
Paula Clough
This forum won't let me edit the post where I posted the Glossary of Glossary ideas xml file. I don't want to overload it with updates, so as I update I will post in the Moodle Exchange at http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=15 in the Glossary Exchange. I will add new ideas from this forum and anothers I come across. You can download it there.
Paula Clough
Just to let you know that the glossary made from this discussion as well as many others listed in the Moodle Exchange are now located in the demo.moodle.org site in the Exchange Samples course. There are also samples of the many of the databases and quiz questions shared on the Exchange.
Be sure to check the Front Page to see the login and password you need to use to get into the site.
Have Fun!
Paula Clough
I've experienced the same thing. I restore a course and the new version is empty. I've found I can return to the original and export it, then import it to the new version and it works pretty well...with the exception of images, which require very time consuming re-linking.
I have wondered if restoring a course with a full backup might give different results...
She is enrolled in this course. You might want to send her a message about it. I am sure that she would not mind.
-- Art
I've had glossaries that students have built up themselves over a term or more. Once printed off using the pretty print option, 2 pages per A4 sheet, they look like quite significant revision aids. You could do this with an existing glossary.
Andy D
That is a great idea, Andy.
Maybe we should create a link to this discussion at http://docs.moodle.org/en/Glossary
Helen? Good idea or bad?
-- Art
Andy,
If you are still listening out there... you need to export the entries before you reset your class from the previous semester. After the reset, you can import them back in. In my understanding you will then have the previous entries you want.
I have used the glossary in my classroom in mostly the traditional sense as a resource for vocabulary words. I typically have each of my students submit one word to a large group resource glossary, and each of their entries must contain the definition, part of speech, an original sentence using the word correctly, and some type of mnemonic or visual device to help classmates remember its meaning. (Two of the most amusing ones, to me anyway, attached.)
I have also started to use it in the last year or so as a database of resources, but this was prior to the release of the database module. I can't say that my voluntary "Collection of Favorite Poems" glossary was wildly successful, but I did have some contributions from unexpected sources. I, too, have tried to work around the issue that A.T. describes: how to come up with a student resource that survives from year to year without having to be tied to user files as I also need to reset my entire course each year. Am sure that feature is somewhere in the future--there might be a hack for it now, but I'm just the average user who has a hard time with anything requiring creative coding on my part.
In any case, here are some pictorial examples of entries from my past students. I know "dogmatic" is difficult to read. Sorry about that. What can I say, some of the girls really got into color experimentation with their entries.
-- Art
In our Moodle Student Support area we have a Condoms FAQ glossary (please find attached) which is highlighted during Health Awareness Week using the random glossary entry block.
, but there might be someone out there that has it in other languages as well.
- A 5th grade teacher uses a glossary in conjunction with the random glossary entry block to create students of the week. He has added a photo of each student to a glossary, without identification, and then each week the random glossary block shows the photo of that student as student of the week. He has the block setup so that it just goes through the list of students in order so everybody gets a turn. The students love it!
- A high school science teacher used a glossary for students to create mini research projects on the organs of the body. Each student had to do the research on an organ and then post information, including photos and other graphics in kind of an encyclopedia format. The work the students did was very impressive.
- The same high school science teacher used another glossary to have students create three quiz questions from the research that they did in the organ study glossary. This glossary was setup so that the students were given one of the Moodle quiz format types, and they created quiz questions matching one of the import formats. The glossary was set so that teacher approval was required before any posts were live so students couldn't see each others questions. After all the questions were submitted, the teacher exported them into a text document and imported all the questions into the quiz module and then tested the students. It worked flawlessly.
- Another great idea is to use the random glossary entry block to do quotes of the day or vocab word of the day.
- Along the same lines as above, a teacher has students create poetry in a glossary and then pushes the poems to the home page using the random glossary entry block.
Put a list of topics into a glossary and set's up the random glossary entry block. A laptop is set up at the front of the classroom so that the person at the front can see it. Students take it in turns to come up to the front, refresh the page and speak for 1 minute on that topic off the top of their head.
After the class make the glossary open for all to see and their homework is to pick another topic than the one they spoke on and write another 1 min speech for next week.
Wow ! What a response. Thankyou so much. At the moment, i produce a newsletter every term. I want to have a 'spotlight on glossaries section', with a short explanation of how to make one and then some ideas on how to use them.Do you mind if i quote you!!
Of course, if anyone wants a copy when ive finished - i'll post it back here ?
Many thanks
Mich
And Randy, I love the "post a random student poem" idea. Will have to adapt that one into my poetry unit this year. Thanks!
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I think that's an important point for collaborative glossaries where students are sharing (like Lesli describes) as I found that the random entry really encouraged students to contribute so their entry had a turn to come up.
Also if you are able to make the glossary public you can share it with another class. A blogging glossary developed by masters students was made available to first year students as a resource for their research on their own blogging assignment.
I would be interested in any tips on this re-publication of glossaries. It seems productive to show how you value student work by publishing it more widely but I am not always sure of the best way to do (exporting from glossaries seems to have problems with images, and you 'lose' the authors).
Mikko Turunen
Finland
We're just getting into Moodle in my company's e-learning initiative. One of the ways we're trying to encourage employees to go and use the site is by using a glossary as a place to share on the job tips and tricks. We often get people sending mass emails with a system or customer tip and we want to encourage them to use the glossary to compile them. We did turn on the "approval" part as the training team has to check the entries for accuracy before they're displayed. We think this will work because it will be one repository for all tips and it gives credit to those who submitted them.
"Browse the glossary using this index."
Could anybody tell me where I can change this?
Do I have to be an administrator to do so?
Lucy
See here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Translation for more information.
Good luck!
At NMIT we have explored the following option:
- Create a glossary for course notes or scenario entries. The glossary is visible to everyone at the top of the course and when they enter the glossary the information text can include hard-coded links to all the entries on a specific topic. This gives a searchable database of course notes or scenario content. Glossary entries can include images, files, multimedia and can also allow comments. Back in the main course area you can then use auto-linking or hard-coded links to send students to specific glossary entries or combinations of entries. The advantage of this is that the links can be inserted anywhere in a Moodle label or web page as text or if hard-coding you can make images links to the content. Although you can't control glossary formats very well you can choose to hide some aspects and to force default display to a single record etc. And of course at the end of the glossary entry you can use auto-linking to send the student direct to the relevant activity or next page. Drawback of using hard-coded links is that you need to change them if you make separate copies of the course or you move the course to a different server.
I have used glossary to make a staff directory inside of a locked staff only course. It took the dean ordering them to fill it out but once we got the teachers using it themselves ideas for using it start to flow.
two birds...
we use the glossary activity to:
+enter keyword in Concept field
+in definition field
-add translation
-phonetic
-link to audio file that says the word
a) annotated book reports
Students can submit their response to the glossary with concept being their name and title of book; teacher allows rating (by teacher) and comments (by all) so that it is easy for both the instructor to grade the original work (indexed by student name) AND students can share their work for peer review/comments prior to instructor grading.
b) community directory of resources:
In one of our health courses (on preventing Elder abuse) we setup a glossary for students to contribute resources for assisting the elderly or elder abuse prevention. Students typed the name of the community resource into the concept field and then typed their annotated description into the definition field with a link (if available) to the resource online. Students were instructed to search the glossary first so as not to replicate other students' resources. BUT editing and commenting was allowed so they could add information as a comment to the original posted resource and the original creator could update the original post as needed. This was also graded by enabling ratings.
c) FAQs for the course compiled by the instructor from feedback from students in prior term courses
d) "Tips" - another Health/Nutrition instructor had a list of frequently used terms and concepts in her course that students always struggled with so she created a Tip of the Day glossary and fed it to the Random Glossary Entry block so a tip would appear each day on the homepage.
e) Along the same vein as "d" - an art history instructor created a teacher glossary of terms with auto-linking on so that she didn't have to interrupt the flow of the course lessons and lectures by stopping and defining each new term. Students could just click on the term (if they needed assistance) and go directly to the glossary (setup using encyclopedia format so some entries could also have a visual representation of the term)
I see the glossary as a powerful tool for enabling student collaboration, peer review, and community building within the course - as well as the traditional sense of defining concepts in a more meaningful way by the instructor. As the glossary can also be exported and imported (reused) over and over, this is a brilliant tool! [as opposed to creating a wiki for the same purpose as the wiki can't be reused over and over w/o restoring entire course w/user data]
Also, with the workshop activity gone from version 1.9 (it was also a little clunky to setup by the instructor!) this still allows for peer collaboration and review instead of just using the discussion forums - and it is indexed!
- Mary
I like the fact that the item can then be commented on and given keywords. It also builds a useful resource which, as has been made clear in earlier posts, exported.
I'm a fan of glossaries, but tend to use them in conjunction with the random glossary entry block. With a largish glossary its a good way of keeping a course fresh.
Ed.
That random glossary block is very nice. I put one on my Moodle sites front page connected to Technology vocabulary Glossary. Teachers were excited to learn (or check their knowledge of ) technology vocabulary each time they logged in.
Paula Clough
Re: Any creative ideas/ stories for using glossaries
I used the Glossary as a test review tool. As students walked into the classroom, they drew a topic from the hat that was going to be on the test. They then worked with a partner to gather everything they could from their individual practice activities, quizzes, textbooks, and online resources like Discovery Education Science. They then added this information to their glossary item in a 15 minute time period.
Once that time was up, we worked through the glossary as a whole group with students adding information or correcting information that they had entered.
My students loved this way of reviewing because they had ownership of their glossary item, but also were able to add to the other entries as we discussed. Those students with special IEPs could print out the sheets or could review from home 24/7.
Over the last year I've tried two things, the first worked (though I don't know if everyone liked it
), the other didn't.- At the last French MoodleMoot I used a glossary to do a giant brainstorming in a lecture room with nearly 300 people. I asked them to organise themselves into groups of 2 to 4 people (sitting where they were) and find answers to the question, "What would make a good collaborative activity on Moodle?" In 15 minutes 42 suggestions were added to the glossary, some serious, others not. The wifi system was just barely able to cope, it almost slowed to a stop - there would probably have been more suggestions otherwise.
- On a French teacher training course for Moodle, I suggested the participants translate into French and add to Paula Clough's Glossary of Glossary Ideas. Maybe because I only thought of this task late in the course, only one person (apart from me) translated an article.
Glenys
Re: Any creative ideas/ stories for using glossaries
Creative glossaries - tips and tricks
Teacher predetermined wordlist vs students creating definitions as they come across new words.
Peer evaluation:
- Assign individuals to contribute a term and its definitions.
- Ask students to rate each others contributions.
- Ask students to comment on each others contributions - help each other define the new terms.
- Ask students to write their own definitions and then other students rate them - highest rated definition becomes the entry for the final class glossary.
- Have a different glossary for each topic/unit/week. Ask different groups in the class to take responsibility for each topic's glossary.
- The other groups are the reviewers of the definitions and they have to comment on the definitions to help that group define the terms correctly.
- Random glossary block - terms that "make the grade" get put into the glossary used in the random glossary block on the main course page. This may help encourage students to write high quality definitions that they can be proud of.
- Entries require approval - to get high quality definitions you can choose "entries require approval". The teacher must approve all entries into that glossary.
- Use roles to allow selected students the right to approve entries - this is a good way to recognise and reward outstanding students.
- Ask students to enter a new word in the concept field, then in the definition field write an example sentence using the new word. Teachers can use the "requires approval" option to check the entries before the other students see them, or use the other students to help that student get the sentence right.
- Credit for word use. The autolinking feature makes it is easy to see when students use the new terms. Teachers could give credit for frequency and correct use of the terminology. It is important for students to regularly use the new terms. This technique may help some students overcome fear of trying to use new terms.
- Collaborative quiz questions - Using "requires approval", teachers can ask the students to contribute the quiz questions for their class assessment. Teachers can setup the categories as question types (to match the quiz activity). Students can then put a key word in the concept field and the question in the definition field. Teachers can then export all the entries and add them to the question pool.
I've just come across this thread. You might be interested in this discussion in the Glossary forum: Using Keywords Glossary feature for language "correction".
Joseph
Hi, if anyone have decision how to restrict in glossary that student, for example, gets 1 point if he set 3 entries? Is there an option to limit number of entries to get a grade?
I've actually created a Glossary to act as a handbook.
I work for a combined uni and vocational-level training provider and have had trouble previously trying to figure out a way to communicate all of the available policies we have to students and staff without providing a gigantic book to them or burying it off to one side. The policies are sorted in alphabetical order (currently) and I'm planning on including things like general terminology and other policies.
Main reason behind this as well is that our policies are provided as separate offline documents for compliance reasons and also because not all policies are relevant to all students. (For example, a policy about assessment will differ between the two as one is pass/fail, the other is not)