Moodle Activity Examples

By Mary Parke

Annotated book reports

Students can submit their response to the glossary with concept being their name and title of book; teacher allows rating (by teacher) and comments (by all) so that it is easy for both the instructor to grade the original work (indexed by student name) AND students can share their work for peer review/comments prior to instructor grading.

By A.T.Wyatt

biographies of people in the field (in our case, we did photographers--they added a link for more information and a link to their favorite picture)

By A.T.Wyatt·

book reviews (with a picture of the cover from one of the big book ordering sites)

By Mary Parke

I see the glossary as a powerful tool for enabling student collaboration, peer review, and community building within the course - as well as the traditional sense of defining concepts in a more meaningful way by the instructor. As the glossary can also be exported and imported (reused) over and over, this is a brilliant tool! [as opposed to creating a wiki for the same purpose as the wiki can't be reused over and over w/o restoring entire course w/user data]

Also, with the workshop activity gone from version 1.9 (it was also a little clunky to setup by the instructor!) this still allows for peer collaboration and review instead of just using the discussion forums - and it is indexed!

By Lesli Smith

I have also started to use it in the last year or so as a database of resources, but this was prior to the release of the database module. I can't say that my voluntary "Collection of Favorite Poems" glossary was wildly successful, but I did have some contributions from unexpected sources. 

by Mary Parke -

community directory of resources:
In one of our health courses (on preventing Elder abuse) we setup a glossary for students to contribute resources for assisting the elderly or elder abuse prevention. Students typed the name of the community resource into the concept field and then typed their annotated description into the definition field with a link (if available) to the resource online. Students were instructed to search the glossary first so as not to replicate other students' resources. BUT editing and commenting was allowed so they could add information as a comment to the original posted resource and the original creator could update the original post as needed. This was also graded by enabling ratings.

by David Sturrock -

Create a glossary for course notes or scenario entries. The glossary is visible to everyone at the top of the course and when they enter the glossary the information text can include hard-coded links to all the entries on a specific topic. This gives a searchable database of course notes or scenario content. Glossary entries can include images, files, multimedia and can also allow comments. Back in the main course area you can then use auto-linking or hard-coded links to send students to specific glossary entries or combinations of entries. The advantage of this is that the links can be inserted anywhere in a Moodle label or web page as text or if hard-coding you can make images links to the content. Although you can't control glossary formats very well you can choose to hide some aspects and to force default display to a single record etc. And of course at the end of the glossary entry you can use auto-linking to send the student direct to the relevant activity or next page. Drawback of using hard-coded links is that you need to change them if you make separate copies of the course or you move the course to a different server.

by David Sturrock -

I have an idea for using the glossary as a home for course resources.

 By Tina Rowe - 

In a similar style to this. For helping students train for debating and public speaking.

Put a list of topics into a glossary and set's up the random glossary entry block. A laptop is set up at the front of the classroom so that the person at the front can see it. Students take it in turns to come up to the front, refresh the page and speak for 1 minute on that topic off the top of their head.

After the class make the glossary open for all to see and their homework is to pick another topic than the one they spoke on and write another 1 min speech for next week.

From Ryan Chadwick