3 Categories of Moodle Wow Factors for the English Teacher who is new to Moodle

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I've had a flash of inspiration vis-a-vis Moodle Wow factors. Assume you were to give a demonstation of Moodle to an English Language teacher with no or limited current experience of using Moodle. Think about it. Which features, blocks, activities, or technology of Moodle would you show?. To my mind, there are 3 categories of Moodle Wow Factors when it comes to English language learning.

Each category contains a set of Moodle tools and/or activities. I, personally, would spend more time demo'ing the first Wow Factor category as it is the easiest to grasp and, quite possibly but subjectively, the easiest to get excited about.

'Student' Wow Factor Category.

These activities are familiar to the English teacher. They are online exercises where students who take them are graded. These activities mirror or are an online version of exercises given in class. 

Figure 1. MILAs on Matt Bury's website

Use Geoffrey Glass' Marginalia to annotate forum posts in Moodle 2.5+

Hi.

Remember Geoffrey Glass' Marginalia? The cool forum annotation tool for Moodle 1.9 and Moodle 2.0? I initially thought that it only worked with Moodle 2.0. I managed to get it to work in Moodle 2.5+ with some sleuthing and tinkering around. I think that it's a great tool for English tutors and teachers as you can annotate text and words within a standard Moodle 2.5 forum! It's great for (manually) correcting spelling or grammar errors in students' forum posts. 



Most of the code is Copyright (c) 2005-2011 Geoffrey Glass and the United Nations. Marginalia is one of those unique plugins that once you realise what you can do with it, you'll wonder why you never used it previously for your Moodle site.

A gem of a tool for English teachers: Marginalia forum web annotation tool for Moodle 1.9 and Moodle 2.0.

Marginalia
Add web annotation to your Moodle forums! This is a great pedagogical tool, from 2008, for those of you teaching English. You can use the Marginalia Moodle plugin to type corrections to your students' forum posts.

Here's a Youtube video showing you the plugin in action. No audio, so don't bother turning up the volume knob on your speakers.

I discovered this tool when I was surfing to find if there was something that I could use that was even close to UK Open University''s web annotation system in their Moodle 2.0. Boy was I glad to find this gem from 2008.