Authoring and assessment tools for and in Moodle.

Moodle is a very popular virtual learning environment. Many English language teachers use it daily as online support to their face-to-face classes.There are Moodle-based English courses too.

However, Moodle has not been designed especially for ELT purposes. English teachers may like to discover the potential of this virtual learning environment and use some -or many- of its features regularly. To find out about how Moodle works and about the different activities you can do with it, you may want to read the book Moodle 1.9 For Second Language Teaching. Some schools now use Moodle 2, but 1.9 is still very popular.

This website aims at analyzing in detail only some tools that Moodle offers to language teachers: authoring and assessment tools. Some of this software is integrated in Moodle (Quizzes) while some other comes from external sites but can be uploaded on to Moodle and used with no major effort or technical difficulties (Hot Potatoes and Exe Learning).

Hot Potatoes

Hot Potatoes is a free software suite developed by the University of Victoria. It runs on Windows. There is a java version for Mac and Linux. The interface is simple and we can create many types of activities that we can use on the local network, on our website or blog or even in Moodle. Multimedia files can also be integrated into our exercises, so we can create listening comprehension activities and exercises which depend on the understanding and use of pictures. With Hot Potatoes we can create:

Crosswords. Examples: Sports and free time activities (definitions are pictures).

True or false comprehension activities.
Multiple choice comprehension and use of English activities.
Short answer comprehension and use of English activities
Matching activities.
Jumbled sentences, paragraphs and texts.
Cloze texts (especially good for songs and gap-filling activities).

An expanded taxonomy of activities created with Hot Potatoes can be found here.

There are several good tutorials about Hot Potatoes on the net:

Tutorials on the official Hot Potatoes website.

Tutorial on French Revision.

Tutorial on ewbook. Contains tips from different users. Very interesting.