Functionality with Moodle : languages in an interconnected world

by Carles Aguiló.  

Dear Moodlers,

I’m happy to be back with topic-specific updates, still at a monthly cadence, and to focus this month on languages.

1. Teaching languages with Moodle

There is an excellent course at Moodle Academy presented by our long-time Moodler and even longer-time language teacher Mary Cooch that can also be found on our Youtube channel.

It not only presents all tools and strategies to teach languages on Moodle, but also suggests plenty of small tricks and ways in which to use those tools effectively, clearly displaying the command of real-life teaching and learning that Mary possesses.

2. Poodll

Poodll is a set of tools that makes language teaching and language assessment a piece of cake. You can create little games like flashcards (with user completion tracking) and a 90’s arcade game in a word learning fashion. You also have all the tools you need to grade the student’s speech or video output automatically or manually, and easily provide them with feedback that can be automatically or custom generated, text, video or audio again, and that will add real formative assessment to their activities. Poodll is also a Moodle Certified Integration, so Moodle has performed an in-depth review of its code and user experience.

3. Languages and educational technology shows

I have been lucky to attend three shows in these first weeks of 2024: Learning Technologies France in Paris, BETT show in London and FOSDEM in Brussels. Whereas I have been to BETT many times, it was my first time for Learning Technologies France and my first time at FOSDEM and both were extremely exciting, buzzing and essentially too successful, as booths were busy the whole time and talks often hung the sign “This room is full”. And for both of them, you better speak a couple of languages too, as English will normally get you far, but there is nothing like communicating with people in their comfort zone, which is their mother tongue.

And that’s it from me! Next month I’ll be back with the results of the 2024 Integrations’ Survey. Until then, have a beautiful time.

Best,

      Carles