Climate Change – EFL Learning Unit on Moodle
“CLIMATE CHANGE” is an online learning unit in English as Foreign Language (EFL) courses uploaded in the Moodle Learning Environment of The Six-Year Kugel High School in Holon, Israel. The unit deals with a very complex issue: climate change. In the light of the GLASGOW CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE – OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2021, the school has tackled the issue to engage pupils in many different ways. This Moodle unit is one of them.
Get a glimpse of the unit: https://youtu.be/7mcWWhV1tJs
During the unit, and gradually, 10th and 11th-grade pupils (15 – 17 years old) are exposed to texts in various formats, some of which are interactive, requiring them to perform actions in the system. Students learn a lot of vocabulary and are tested on Moodle itself: there is one Moodle Quiz that contains different types of questions, one Moodle Assignment that first requires pupils to understand a spoken text (Listening Comprehension) and then record themselves using Moodle’s voice recording microphone (Oral Production), and another Moodle Assignment that requires pupils to submit a writing task (Written Production).
Upon completion, pupils should be able to express themselves in English in relation to the main messages of the unit, i.e. reasons for climate change, the impact of climate change on life on Earth, and more. Students also develop the ability to actively engage in English on a wide range of topics related to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
I, as a teacher in my courses, accompany the students’ learning, but it is important to emphasize that one of the main points in the unit is the transfer of learning responsibility to the teenage students themselves: learning depends on the students’ willingness to invest effort and time.
Traditionally, the English staff at The Six-Year Kugel High School collaborates (among other things, sharing learning materials), so this unit can be used by any English staff colleague in the different English courses at school. The unit has also been uploaded to the Moodle Environment’s English teachers shared course, where every teacher of English has teacher’s permissions so that it can be shared on different courses using Moodle’s Sharing Cart.
Moodle is an online teaching and learning system. Each course at Kugel has a separate course in the system, and all course teachers can edit a course and use it to conduct all the online activities in the course. These activities include uploading learning materials such as reading texts, listening to texts (sound files), watching videos, recording sound, doing online exercises, sending messages to students, submitting assignments and computerized tests, and more. Moodle can include a wide variety of options.
It is good to know: The system interface language can be changed at any time by selecting the desired language from the navigation bar at the top of the page. Using Moodle to teach English, teachers and Kugel students switch the system interface language to English.
Eduardo Lina – English teacher at The Six-Year Kugel High School in Holon, Israel.
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