Joseph Rézeau

Mostly for language teachers...

When using Moodle for language courses, the forums offer students a valuable opportunity to practise their written expression skills.

However, there remains for the teacher the difficult problem of dealing with language mistakes in the students' production. The solution of posting to the forum a message correcting a student's faulty message can have the adverse effects of a) making that student resentful of seeing his mistakes thus corrected in public and b) generally make the students wary of posting to the forum... Quite the reverse of what we would like to achieve.

On the other hand, not correcting blatant mistakes can result in the student(s) believing such postings are OK and making the same mistake again and again.

The keywords facility in the Glossary entries seems to offer an "in-between" option, as explained below.

• Create a new glossary, call it e.g. Common mistakes or Write better English etc.
• Enter as concept any grammar or vocabulary use point as needed.
• In the keywords list, start with one or two examples of actual mistakes found in the students' postings, and add up to this list as needed.
• For Definition, write a grammar rule, a list of examples, etc.
  

Example

In one student's posting we can read this: "Some games are far from geing educational. Finally, you must make the good choice."
This is a simple transposition of the French expression "faire le bon choix", showing a typical misuse of the adj. good, where "the right choice" would be better English.

• In your Queen's English Glossary:
• As concept enter e.g. correctness.
• In the keywords list, enter the good choice, the good solution, the good page.
• For Definition, write e.g.
  

Don't say: the good answer, the good choice, the good page Say: the right answer, the right choice or the correct answer/choice/page

On subsequent display of the faulty message, it will be auto-linked and will look something like this: "Some games are far from geing educational. Finally, you must make the good choice."
A click on the linked expression will display the relevant "correctness" entry from the Grammar Glossary.

I'm looking forward to fellow moodlers' reactions on this proposed "diverted" use of the Glossary, whether for language teaching or other fields.

Joseph_R

Hi Eloy,
just sent a feature request:
http://moodle.org/bugs/bug.php?op=show&bugid=2774&pos=5

Hasta la vista
 

In WebCT, the forums not only have this option of choice between "reply" and "reply with quote" but also "reply privately". I have found all those options really useful. The "private reply" is of the "reply with quote" type, i.e. the message to which you are replying is already pasted in your reply window.

It is indeed useful to be able to send a "private" reply to a student simply by clicking a button. Of course, in Moodle, all you have to do is to click on the icon or name linking directly to the sender's profile and, from there, click on the link to their e-mail address. It should also be noted that in WebCT private replies are sent to an individual's internal e-mail box, since WebCT has such an internal mail system, a feature I would very much like to see implemented in Moodle.

I don't know if moodlers on this forum realize that whereas "copying & pasting" is to us a trivial operation, it is beyond the capacities of a fairly large number of our students (at least my own students...). Which makes a "reply with quote" a useful alternative to copy & paste.

Joseph_R

Thanks, Martin, just what I wanted .

However, for the sake of flexibility (and to answer Dareen's query , could this be made an option (at teacher level), so that teachers could choose to view graphs either as lines or bars ?

Joseph_R

Hello!

The graphs representing a student's activity report are of two sorts:
a) the day's report is a bar graph
b) the "all days" report is a line graph.

The bar graph suits me fine.
In courses where students only log in from time to time, e.g. once or twice a week, I find the line graph display not very representative and would much prefer a bar graph like in the daily report.

Is there any setting anywhere which would allow one to switch from line to bar graph?

TIA

Joseph_R