Abstract:

Moodle is a free and open-source online education platform used by lots of schools and universities around the world. It is possible to provide students and teachers with online access to educational materials, teaching tools and learning activities. Moodle can be part of a curriculum with a blended approach in which actual classroom tasks and activities are extended in an online space. The use of Moodle has been recently getting more and more popular in ELT, and language teachers are discovering the larger potential and more power that Moodle has compared to other online environments. Moodle can support language teachers and students not only as a place to share information but also as a social platform where they can interact with their teachers and classmates in various forms.

I aim to show the Moodle possibilities that language teachers can exploit in their online teaching to foster interactive learning among their students. The tools and suggested activities are going to be shown in a showcase created for the purpose of demonstration. The viewers are going to be provided access to the online class so that they will have a chance to experience the tools and activities.

- FORUM:
- Reading teachers can use it for post-lesson discussions over classroom reading topics.
- Writing teachers can use it to publish information gathered before writing paragraphs, essays, reports, etc.
- Q&A: Teacher-to-student and student-to-student question&answer activities
- Link sharing: Students could share their favorite links on the topics/structures determined by the teacher.
- WIKI:
- Reading teachers can use it to find & correct information mistakes in reading texts.
- Writing teachers can use it to do brainstorming before writing paragraphs or essays.
- WORKSHOP:
- Students can be encouraged to assess each other’s work based on a criteria provided by the teachers.
- GLOSSARY:
- Reading and Writing teachers can create a whole-class glossary in which each student are assigned to enter a certain number of words learned weekly. Word definitions, example usages, images and sound files can be entered for each entry. Other students can contribute in the form of comments for each entry.
- QUESTIONNAIRE:
- Writing teachers can create events in which students vote for the best essays, messages, etc. so that they read each other’s products.
- Reading teachers can post a number of stories and the class chooses the best one.
- CHAT:
- Teachers can come together with their class in the Moodle chat room to discuss issues that are talked in actual classrooms. The conversations in the chat room are recorded as logs which teachers could use to work on language errors, rhetorical problems, etc. Students could work on their or each other’s errors to give peer feedback.

Sample Showcase login info:
http://eflmoodle.isikun.edu.tr/course/view.php?id=33
Username: inted2013
Password: inted2013

Keywords:

Moodle, moodle, online, ELT, elt, language, learning, teaching, blended, interactive.