I created a drop down unit for each skill. I did this using the collapsed topics plug-in to help with scroll of death issues.
Scroll of death can be hidden from students! This seems to work fine and all of the students navigated around it with no problems.
Inside each of the topics there are buttons which are hyperlinked to pages within scroll of death.
The names of the buttons and how they describe what is behind them was a challenge. I wanted to make buttons that will continue through each level but that causes problems with how to describe grammar such as 'discourse markers' which is not necessarily a phrase which students know at pre-intermediate level but i think it is important to have continuity through the levels.
Under the topic buttons are moodle pages which live in scroll of death and can be edited to hold the content that is required.
As the idea of the site is to create a self access environment of external resources for students to practice their language the moodle pages mostly consist of links to other sites. Some of them have explanations others do not.
Feedback from one student suggested that the links came with some kind of description of what the link will be to help students navigate to what they want to study and the type of material they want to use.
This could be done by tagging each link with a few basic comments or by listing them under different sub-headings such as 'interactive grammar', 'grammar games', 'matching exercises', 'grammar information' etc.
Visually I also think that the pages of links need to be broken up in some way. Even if just by putting small visuals relating to the sites they come from so students can build up an idea of preferences.
It was also suggested that there was a list of resources available for teachers so they could direct students towards specific things. This would have to be built up from the start of a course and formatting and labelling would be important.
Having listened to the feedback from students I re-worked the pages, particularly in the grammar section to give them all headings and descriptions of what the link will take you to. I tested this again on a couple of students with good feedback. Having the page split into exercises and explanations also seemed to help. It gives more structure to the page so if the students need to find out information while they are completing exercises they now know where to look. The reading and writing pages still need to be re-designed in someway but i am unsure how to do this other than just putting headings at the top of the page.
No comments:
Post a Comment