Assumptions

Most of this book is a recipe book, a "how-to" book. In it, I'll take activities that you'd find in a typical language-teaching syllabus and show how you can produce these on Moodle. I'll provide step-by-step instructions for you to copy examples and then adapt them according to your own teaching situation. Most of the activities are ordered so that each chapter starts with easier activities. The ease of setup for each activity is indicated by a star system. Now and then you'll be referred to other chapters where an example already exists.

The non-recipe chapters are guides for setting up Moodle (Chapter 2, Getting Started with Moodle), using Moodle for assessment (Chapter 9, Assessment), making your Moodle site look good (Chapter 11, Formatting and Enhancing Your Moodle Materials), and helping prepare students to use Moodle (Chapter 12, Preparing Your Students to Use Moodle).

I'm making a few assumptions:

• You have basic computer skills

• You have Moodle up and running

• You are not necessarily familiar with Moodle's basic features

• You want examples of how you can cover your language teaching syllabus using Moodle

• You don't want to master all aspects of Moodle

• You are not necessarily the Moodle administrator, but have access to the administrator

• You have some experience of teaching

• You want to transfer constructivist, communicative language teaching methodology to Moodle.

In case you're not familiar with these concepts, constructivism is based on the idea that individuals learn new things (construct knowledge) through experience by comparing new things to what they already know. They do this by solving realistic problems, often in collaboration with other people. Moodle was built on this approach, and many of the core activities lend themselves well to this type of learning. Communicative language teaching tries to help learners become competent language users in real contexts. There's more about this later in this chapter.