Unit 1 Vocab Quiz
Flaviana Bresee
The vocab terms are introduced during the class discussions. The students will have 2 quizzes on the terms. Basically the terms are split in half for the quizzes. Each quiz will only be given after the terms are introduced in the discussions.
@thomasb It is important for students to be able to put a term and definition to what they are doing. I have some of the basic programming concepts in vinyl on my classroom walls. It makes for good discussion, connections and decoration.
The pre-assessment measures your students vocabulary levels before they begin The Word Up Project, and is presented in the same format and level of difficulty as the post-assessment. At the end of the unit, you will be able to measure vocabulary growth by comparing results on the pre- and post-assessment. If you choose to set up a student- and class-tracking system, the pre-assessment will be the first data point to track.
When you give the pre-assessment, you should not count the score toward students grades, as the purpose of the test is to determine how much students need to learn. If you tell your students that it does not count for a grade, explain that they should take the assessment seriously. Make sure to tell them that you don't expect them to know all the words.
If students do very well on the pre-assessment, it is important to stress that there are many other words that they will still learn, and that they will have the opportunity to become experts on the words they already know. However, if the majority of your class scores better than 80% on the pre-assessment, you may want to consider using the next level of The Word Up Project.
If you choose to do classroom tracking, you can share the students averages with them, but it is not necessary to review the answers at this time, as students will learn the words over the course of The Word Up Project.
You should give the post-assessment to your students upon completion of all units of The Word Up Project to measure vocabulary growth from the pre-assessment. You can also use the results of this test as a final data point on a class- or student-tracking chart. When you return the test, you should celebrate how much students have learned since they took the pre-assessment. We'd also love to know how well the program worked for your students. Feel free to email the results to [email protected].
NGPF's Unit Review materials have been created using some of our favorite tech tools: Quizlet, Kahoot, and Quizizz. These collections allow students to review important vocabulary and core content knowledge within each unit.
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Because I teach middle and high school, I like to use words from ACT/SAT word lists to teach vocabulary. Not only will students be more prepared for standardized tests, but also they will encounter the words in life. My favorite word list is from this book.
Have students look at multiple pictures, like this, and select words they associate with those images. Then, have them explain their connection. Or, students can draw pictures or comic strips that relate to the word.
Create stations the day before the quiz using task cards and interactive assignments. Have students move between these different activities as a means of studying for their test during class.
I use white boards and chalkboards and sometimes even notebook paper and set a certain amount of time for students to practice their words in this unconventional way. In order to make sure all words are covered, write them on slips of paper, and have each student draw a slip on his or her turn.
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I see there is a Quizlet plug in. I was curious what else others have used or if you could share your experiences with teaching vocab through Moodle, whether it was through 3rd party websites, plug in, etc...
Firstly, creating your own material is very time consuming but it's probably unavoidable if you are complimenting existing course materials. I try to focus on collocations a lot and use the book activity combined with prepared glossaries. If you add in the Game activity, you can create crosswords and other word games from glossaries and quizzes. Using this combination, you can create a good variety of activities for learners. If you are teaching ELT, then the Vocabulary in Use series from Cambridge University Press offer lots of ideas that can be adapted.
Although the concept is out of favour with some teachers, Moodle is good for drilling vocabulary. With a large database of questions you can create quizzes that evolve (using random questions). My weaker learners particularly like this, as they can practice in private which relieves the peer pressure.
On a theoretical note, I'd recommend you have a look at Michael Lewis's book, Implementing the Lexical Approach. It's focused on English as a foreign language, but the principles apply to all languages. It adds considerable leverage to vocabulary learning and certainly helped me to get the most out of Moodle's potential.
The Quizlet plugin handles the embed of the activity, but as you have discovered that is possible to do by hand. The real benefit is that you can import quizlet sets as multichoice and short answer questions, direct to the Moodle question bank complete with pictures. And you can rapidly create Quizlet activities that have a time based conditional completion setting. (So you can be sure your students at least opened the activity for X minutes.) Its actually a commercial plugin. But contact me anyway if you want to talk about it.
Also I used PoodLL Flashcards a lot, and in different ways when I was teaching. Mostly for pair practice and not for memory style learning. I would make flashcard sets based on words / grammar we were learning, and often mixed in teachers or students names into the prompt on the card. Student loved it because it was fun and felt like a game. Each student would read the prompt on the front of the card to their partner, and their partner would have to make something from it. eg
I've been asked to provide a crossword activity for practicing concepts in a second year Law course. Personally I don't find the crossword particularly effective for such a purpose. The crossing of words and the typical conversion of phrases to one lower/upper case word are more a distraction than useful cues. Flashcard activities are probably much more suitable for concept drilling than crosswords. But for various mostly irrelevant reasons it was decided to go with crosswords.
The easy route was to use the game plugin. But the game plugin doesn't seem to have a solid ongoing support. It also contains much more than may be needed, without a clean way to remove unwanted components. And so I decided to construct a minimal crossword plugin as a dataformfield sub-plugin of the Dataform activity.
A typical implementation would consist of a Dataform activity with a crossword field, a view which displays the list of attempts and a view which displays a single attempt in editing mode. The concepts and definitions are entered in the field configuration as concept-definition pairs, separated by a space (as the concept is rendered as one word), each pair in a new line. Other settings in the field allow for controlling the crossword dimensions (max row size) and min and max number of words.
In a typical usage users add an entry for a crossword attempt. The crossword is generated on entry creation. It is displayed and can be solved when editing the entry. Current solution is stored when saving the entry. Depending on the number of available concepts, subsequent entries will generate different crosswords. In the attempts list it is possible to display the number of words in the attempt, number of letters, number of words solved, and completion % (number of letters solved / number of letters).
To learner A, you give the words across, which they use to fill in their half of the puzzle. While they're doing that, they can think of the best clues they can to describe/define the words to their partner, B.
Because the learners have to think for themselves about the concepts and how to describe/define them, and because it's for a social, collaborative purpose, i.e. a social game, they're far more likely to #1 - ensure that they understand their set of concepts really clearly, and #2 - remember the concepts that their partner explains to them; because it triggers particular aspects of our social, collaborative nature, i.e. we tend to be much better at remembering stuff that has social currency/value, e.g. something a friend or colleague tells us or discusses with us (Can't remember the specific research papers right now).
However, I don't think that there's an adequate module or plugin for doing this in Moodle. One suggestion: You can try the various synchronous and asynchronous communication modules that support groups or groupings so that you can pair off learners automatically. Then they can talk or write their clues and guesses to each other. If they do it in chat, then you can check what they've written. If they do it via WebRTC, Skype, etc., it's more difficult to check but the learners will probably do it well because they understand it's for their own benefit.
Another activity is the Glossary module is collaborative mode, i.e. learners can create and comment on their own and each others' entries. Having auto-linking on makes it doubly useful in that their descriptions/definitions will show up in future texts that they study on the course. The glossary module also support rich multimedia so entries can get quite elaborate if you have keen, tech-savvy learners.
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