Who is this book for?

One of the advantages of a recipe-book approach is that all sorts of people connected to language teaching will find it useful. If you are a teacher, you can dip into it to find a quick solution for an activity you want to create. If you are a course planner, you can review the whole book to build up your own language course. These are some of the people I had in mind when writing:

• School language teachers who run at least part of their courses on computers

• Private language teachers who want to run their own online language school

• Established teachers of English or other languages

• New teachers who want clear examples of communicative language teaching and testing in use

• Teacher trainers who want to guide teachers in the use of this powerful system

• Teachers who have been using Blackboard or another powerful commercial VLE and want to set up their own open source system

• Course planners and ICT support staff who want to understand the ICT needs of language teachers better

An important point here is that there's no single way of using Moodle for language teaching. I've come across teachers who use it mainly as a repository of materials and find the indexing facilities of the Database module useful for that. Module, by the way, is Moodle's word for an activity. Other teachers use it to create supplementary quizzes for the work they do in class. They find the gradebook, which provides an overview of all their students' marks, useful. Other teachers make Moodle the base of their course, even though they have face-to-face sessions, because Moodle is a neat way of keeping important course elements in one place and tracking learner use and progress. It's also a good way of preparing for classes and reflecting on them afterwards. Finally, Moodle can be used as a totally online course with no face-to-face meeting at all.

You might find I'm stating the obvious sometimes, but most hints are included because there were minor hiccoughs when teachers trialed the materials. On the other hand, some readers might feel phased by mention of formats they've never heard of, such as XML or WAV. If that's the case, don't worry! These are usually extra bits of information that some teachers will find useful to make their lives easier or improve the Moodle activities. Not understanding them — or not wanting to understand them — won't stop you from creating the activities.