Entries from February 2006 ↓

Please check out some quizzes (including jumbled words, cloze, hangman activities and one battleship) made to test some of the vocab. that appear in the listening tasks (units 1-6).
Try them out and let me know if you find any errors. Students will also be provided links to these activities. They can either be set for self-study (homework) or be assigned to students to do as part of the course work.

UNIT 1 FAMILIES

UNIT 1 TIME FOR A CHANGE

UNIT 2 LEARNING STYLES

UNIT 2 WHAT THEY LEARNT IN SCHOOL

UNIT 3 WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT THE CITY?

UNIT 3 WHAT’S THE CITY LIKE?

UNIT 4 I HAD THE WILDEST DREAM

UNIT 4 MANAGING STRESS

UNIT 5 DIFFERENCES & SIMILARITIES

UNIT 5 PROBLEM SOLVING

UNIT 6 SMALL TALK

UNIT 6 TELL ME ABOUT IT

Check out the following activities (Rags to Riches) that test the students’ comprehension of the listening tasks from Units 1 through 6. Feel free to try them out beforehand and please let me know if you find any errors. The links will be available for students, also. They can either be recommended to the students to do as homework or be assigned as required work.

UNIT 1 A

UNIT 1 B

UNIT 2 A

UNIT 2 B

UNIT 3 A

UNIT 3 B

UNIT 4 A

UNIT 4 B

UNIT 5 A

UNIT 5 B

UNIT 6 A

UNIT 6 B

I usually find there are two ways that I get up to speed with new technology stuff: Either I go through things step-by-step and build up skills in order; or, I just wander around and let all the information wash over me until it starts to make sense.

Well, if you follow either of these ways of learning about new stuff, these videos should help you. There are three Moodle training videos here that you can watch online anytime you like. I didn’t make them. They were created by Paul Treadwell at Cornell University for the Digital Divide Network. We can use Cornell’s resources because he shared them under a Creative Commons license. Thanks, Paul!

Obirin’s Moodle Course has a slightly different design, but the tools and ideas are the same.

First, there is a general introduction to a simple course.
Working with Moodle- Course Skeleton and adding Resources, Courtesy of Paul Treadwell and Marguerite Wells- Cornell University. About 10 minutes.

Next, there is a video showing how to add a quiz.

Finally, there is a demonstration of how to add video to your Moodle course. About 3 minutes.

All these videos were provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

This is the portfolio rating scale I created while working on the Level 3 Writing course teachers notes:

Level 3 Portfolio Rating Scale

I have tried to make the criteria as conceptually independent as possible, without being specific as to the material required of the writer, however, this scale assumes that the writer will be asked to make a cover letter and table of contents for the portfolio.

Regarding the material to be presented, there are a number of options for that, including but not limited to: mind maps, notes, failed draft attempts, first drafts, and typed versions of final drafts. Please keep in mind that student choice in selecting the material is a key principle in portfolio assessment, as is progress (rather than perfection in the final product), which is the rationale for the last two bands of the scale (paragraph development and grammar/vocab development).

It was hard to differentiate, in the absence of actual student work, between the D and F levels of the scale, so I have grouped them into one level. If anybody has suggestions as to how a D performance might differ from an F one, please do tell.

As mentioned in the notes, this scale implies only one way of marking the assignment and I expect that other useful grading criteria might emerge during the course of the semester–download, modify, and share!

Dan

P.S. Chapter 9 of the book Assessing Writing by Sara Weigle deals entirely with Portfolio Assessment. You can borrow this book from the library in the meeting room of the PFC 3F office.