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Most teachers use the internet with their students in one form or another including email to contact students or yahoo groups to have a simple message board and file repository. Other things that teachers do is direct students to web sites related to the lesson, show YouTube videos, and of course as a lesson planning resource. Email, Yahoo groups, and YouTube are not pedagogically designed.

Setting up a web site as a centralized location with pedagogically sound design is an excellent alternative to the above options. Building such a site from scratch would seem to be nigh impossible due to the need to know various programming languages such as php, xhtml, css, javascript, ruby on rails, ajax and more.
The answer to this is MOODLE (http://moodle.org), which is fully designed with educational principles in mind and fully functional for teachers and administrators. The best part of MOODLE, for the budget minded instructor, is that it is open source and thus free of cost other than the price of paid hosting which can be had for less than us$100 a year.

MOODLE is feature intensive and has something for every teacher. The appearance is easily customizable with one click theme selection. Additionally, it is possible with some knowledge of CSS to create your own theme using the chameleon theme as a starting point.

Some of the many features useful to EFL instructors include: multiple courses, different course formats including weekly, topic, and discussion, enrollment keys, WYSISWYG editor, logs, modules including assignment, forum, wiki, quiz, glossary, downloadable files and embeddable media, grade book and a mailing list.

These features can be split into two categories, classroom or educational and administrative.
I find the ability to email students as a group incredibly helpful. Email notices can be sent via the news forum, which acts like a mailing list. This mailing list is granular in that you can send email to students site wide, in specific courses, or specific groups of students within a course. Additionally, you can send private messages/email to individual students. I use this feature when I forget to tell students important information in class, when I am sick and have to cancel class, and to contact students who have skipped class several times.

Instructors can choose from three different formats; weekly, topic, and discussion. I find the weekly format to be the most useful as I can set the course to have 16 weeks; the same as the semester. However some content based courses could clearly benefit from a topical organization where your site would have, for example, six sections completed over the semester.

Logs are a powerful way to keep track of what students are doing on your site. The instructor can see what everyone has done for the whole day or part of a day. Additionally, the teacher can choose one particular student and track which activities they have completed, how many times they have looked at resources or downloaded materials for class. This is very useful if the instructor is including web site usage as a component of classroom evaluation or participation.

Finally, the grade book is probably the most useful and powerful administrative usage for the teacher. Every activity that students do on MOODLE can be assigned a grade. Grades are organized in the grade book according to categories set up by the teacher. Furthermore, points can be weighted in various ways including the option to have work count for extra credit.

At the end of the course grades can be downloaded in ODS, Excel, or CSV format. Additionally, instructors may add grades for work completed offline. Finally the grade book adds transparency to the course as each time a grade is assigned students automatically receive an email notice with a link to their grade. In the grade book learners are able to see their current grade and progress throughout the course.

There are numerous features to make use of for the language classroom including: groups, message boards, assignments, embeddable audio and video, downloadable files, wikis, quizzes (with multimedia), chat and more.

Groups are one of my favorite features. Using groups allows you to set up activities with students arranged in groups that can be configured to be completely separate, visible, or turned off. Separate groups ensures that groups cannot see or interact with each other. Visible allows groups to see other groups but not interact with each other and of course with groups turned off everyone works together. This setting can be configured at the site level, course level or individual activity level. I extensively use this setting when teaching multiple sections of the same course so that each class is separate, but I only have to prepare activities once.

Message boards are exactly as you would expect, however they come with some extra configuration options including: the ability to restrict the board to one long thread, restrict students to starting only one thread, but being able to respond to all threads and also assign grades to individual posts which will be immediately added to the students’ grade book with email notification. Forums are clearly a great way to build interaction among students.

The assignment module is multi faceted and a powerful way to receive and grade individual student work. This module comes in four flavors, offline, online text, upload a file, and advanced uploading of files. Offline assignments are for placing instructions of activities done in class and also to add an online grade if the instructor wants to. Online text is essentially a private journal that only the instructor can read and respond to. Upload a file allows students to upload any type of file including, MSword, Photoshop, wmv, mp3 and more. This is excellent for having students upload essays. Advanced uploading allows students to upload multiple files at one time.

In all areas of MOODLE it is possible to embed media. The instructor can embed files that they have uploaded to the site including flash, mp3, wav, avi, and wmv. These files will automatically be embedded by the MOODLE site with the built in media player upon linking to on any page or module. Additionally, it is very easy to embed videos from popular sites such as YouTube.

MOODLE also has a powerful quiz module that allows creation of a question bank as well as multiple question types and answer formats. Quizzes can have question order randomized as well as answer order within questions randomized for added security against cheating. Additionally, quizzes can have media embedded into both the question and the answer. If you already have hot potato quizzes created you can use those in the hot potato module making migration to MOODLE easy. Quizzes in MOODLE are both easy and powerful.

One of the best options for me is the ability to upload files for students to download and preview before class. The file management tool is very easy to use and organize. I have all of my students download handouts for each week before class. I also have essay templates set up so that when I receive completed essays they are formatted the way I like: font, font size, line spacing, page numbering & header.

There are two other modules that I think are excellent for language learning but have not been able to use myself. The first is the wiki module and, like all MOODLE modules, has several options and configurations that will help the instructor set up a class wiki. The second is the chat module. Unfortunately, due to restrictions with the budget hosting I use, I am unable to use chat due to potential overuse of resources. If you have your MOODLE on a dedicated server or VPS hosting using chat should not be an issue.

If you would like to know more about MOODLE visit the official site http://moodle.org or leave a comment on my blog and I’d be happy to help if I can.

Overall it was a good day for me. I did arrive too early. For some reason I thought it started at 12:00 not 1:00. So of course I arranged my train tickets to arrive early so I could scope out the room I would be presenting in. This meant that I was instead of being 40 minutes early I was 1 hour and 40 minutes early. Yikes! Fortunately for me I always carry a book and had something to do while I waited.

The first presentation which was a panel discussion on the state of CALL in Korea was hampered by tech problems. It was supposed to be a group of four people discussing questions via web cam and projected on the screen. Nothing worked. The funny thing is 45 mintues before they started everything was working great - I had watched as they tested and set up.

THe next presentation I went to was by a first time moodle user. THe presentation was okay, but seemed a little disorganized. Even so I’m sure the curious and unimformed walked away being more informed than they previously were. My presentation was next and the room was full, somewhere between 25 and 30 people I think. I had no tech problems other than a sore throat and an inability to project my voice as well as I normally do. I think my presentation went well, though I may have gone at a bit of a breakneck pace at points since I had too much material to cover.

The final presentation I saw was by a friend and focused a lot on the uses of wikis (an integrated moodle module) and video exchanges with students in Japan. The presentation was informative but had technical problems due to his use of a Macintosh computer and not being able to hook it up to the projector.

At the end of the day there were 11 door prizes, one of which I was able to walk away with - Practical English Language Teaching: Listening.

Overall I enjoyed the day. I was however disappointed to see that all of the CALL presentations were focusing on Moodle. I would have expected something on blogging or the use of social networks. These are two areas that I am interested in, but haven’t yet managed to use with my classes. It would be great to attend a presentation by a teacher using blogs in the classroom to learn what they like and don’t like about that approach.

Moodle Presentation
Chris Surridge had a presentation on using Moodle in the EFL classroom in Korea yesterday at the KOTESOL Seoul chapter meeting that was well done. He talked about a couple features that I don’t use such as the gradebook and attendance module and another upcoming module that uses an open source version of flash server technology which I am very keen on. I had the pleasure of talking with Chris for a few minutes and hopefully later this semester will meet again over coffee to talk shop and moodle. If you missed his presentation you missed something worth going to.

KOTESOL National Conference
Speaking of presentations KOTESOL’s national conference is coming at the end of October. Early registration is available through October 4th. The plenary speakers include; Andy Curtis, Nina Spada, and Jack Richards. The ten featured speakers are; Susan Barduhn, Chris Candlin, Liying Cheng, Marc Helgesen, Anne Hilty, Ritsuko Nakata, Susan Stempleski, and Gillian Wigglesworth. There will of course be many other presentations made by educators and commercial sponsers. I will not be presenting this year but will be attending.

Korean Podcast
This seems to have fallen by the wayside. I did a fair amount of work on it over the summer but when I contacted the others involved in the project I got one weak response and no follow-up. Clearly the interest has faded. This is in part my fault, I didn’t work on the design end as much as I should (it’s not finished either) and I didn’t follow-up on emails with my collaborators in the way I should have to see this through to the end. As it stands, the podcast is in limbo.

More Moodle
Last semester I set up a moodle for teachers at my university if they were interested and I have four using it this semester with another two asking me to set up space for them now so they can play with it before next semester. I spent a couple of hours with two teachers and then another hour with one teacher giving some basic training before setting them free. Other than that time everything has gone really smoothly for them and they are definitely enjoying using moodle to extend their classrooms. I have had to answer a few troubleshooting emails and about 10 minutes on MSN Messenger but the time spent on that is much less than I had anticipated.

With this success I am going to be writing a proposal to the department asking for funding for a moodle installation on either a dedicated server or on a computer purchased by the department that I can maintain. This will allow greater flexibility in what we can do and essentially unlimited storage space since we would have the entire harddrive for storage. Greater flexibilty is important as there are somethings that I cannot do with moodle due to hosting it on a shared (budget) host.

Presentations Class
Presentations class is different then what I expected. It turns out that I am teaching the class for 2 hours twice a week for sixteen weeks instead of 2 hours once a week. Additionally the textbook was chosen by the department. Needless to say my original plan went out the door when I found this out. However I have resurrected parts of my plan including the original textbook I had selected. The book chosen by the department Presenting in English by Mark Powell has got to be one of the worst textbooks to have ever been published - I shall not spend time discussing the travesty that this waste of a tree is.

I’ve managed to use it for 10 minutes so far and we are about to start week four. The book I have chosen, Presentations for Dummies is much better. I cannot ask the students to buy it, so I make copies of the pages I am using for the week and we go with that. I am making extensive use of various videos I found on youtube and google video to illustrate both good and bad techniques in public speaking. Students have given a presentation each week, including the very first day of class. Each presentation is getting longer and incorporating more aspects of successful public speaking skills. This weeks presentation will be 5 minutes long and peer evaluated. Next week we will have the first presentation that counts for a grade towards their course. This presentation will be video taped and then the following class I will meet students individually and watch thier video and provide oral feedback in addition to the written feedback they have recieved. The department is also going to make CDs for each student so they can go home and watch themeselves. Videotaping will be done for all three graded presentations.

I used the following video last week during the body language lesson - I did warn the students that this video wasn’t serious but that it did illustrate the usefulness of body language.

Errata
I think I will return to blogging now, but not at the same pace or frequency as before. Probably not more than two or three times in a month.

• 100% Unicode support - all 70 existing languages are now compatible and can be mixed wherever you like. 


• New documentation wiki - a one-stop shop for all documentation, integrated from within each page of Moodle itself.


• Database module - a new activity module for collaborative collection and display of arbitrary data


• Blogs - finally Moodle has blogs for ongoing personal reflections, viewable by course, by group, by individual etc


• New reports - plug-in reports enable you to create and share new report types.  New statistics reports are included in Moodle 1.6.


• Questions - quiz question types are now a centralised structure so any module will be able to use them in future.


• LAMS - a new activity module and course format allow LAMS to be easily integrated with Moodle if you need to


• My Moodle - a new customizable dashboard page with an overview of all your own courses and what is new


• Hive integration - Moodle can be closely integrated with Hive, a leading object repository, with single-sign-on etc.


• Multiple groups - users can be part of any number of groups in a course


• IMS content packages - can now be loaded as resources


• New Chameleon theme - can be customised in your browser on the fly!


• Granularised backup - allows you to backup only selected activities


• Multi Enrolments - use any number of Moodle’s enrolment methods at once, including the new IMS Enterprise methods