lak losing this presentation you can actually thank or if you prefer blame Gavin because it was his idea to talk about teaching languages with mudil. I didn't really know what to present on this time and when Gavin suggested it I thought well yes. I did teach languages for 28 years before I joined Moodle in 2013 and when we got to moodle in my school, which was 2006. It was through teaching languages that I got to learn about and love Moodle. However, once I'd agreed and it was too late to change my mind, I suddenly thought, oh no, what have I let myself in for? Because there is so much that you could talk about relating to language teaching and Moodle and not only the functionality but the pedagogy, the strategies, how am I going to fit it all in? So I'm going to have to be utterly ruthless and really, really focused. So we are just going to look at the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing and explore some activities that you can use for teaching these skills. And yes, I am very aware that they are not separate or discrete. For instance, if you're going to practice speaking, you ought to listen to someone before you respond if it's a dialogue. Often, if you have a writing task, you're required to read something first and respond to it. And a dictation, what's that? It's when you listen and you write down what you hear. So we can't really split them up. But just for the sake of having some kind of a hook or an angle, that's what we'll do. So let's begin with listening and what kinds of things you can use in Moodle for that. And of course, Moodle lends itself really well. It makes it really easy to insert media, audio and video. What you see here is the screen that you get to if you're in the auto editor and you click the media button and you can upload or you can display audio and video. You also have got some neat advanced settings there such as play automatically. I don't really like looping and you can upload your own subtitles and captions. So whether you want to do that or not for language teaching is a question we don't have time for. And if you do that, you get to something like this. So this is a standard matching question type in the quiz. And our teacher has the option of either uploading through the media icon like we just saw or the two really cool record your voice or record your face icons in the auto editor there. And this question, for instance, this is where the student has to listen to an emotion being expressed and identify what it is and what the student sees is this. And so you can see there that they've got to listen and then they choose the emotion. And something really cool in Moodle 3.11 while we're here is that students can now change the play rate or change the speed at what they hear for that particular audio and video. So that is really useful for language teaching. Now it's not only through standard Moodle in the auto editor. There is also the H5P audio when you have a screenshot of that there, uploading or pasting. And what you can do with that is it makes the nice, neat little icon, there it is there in blue, that you can add or embed in places. So this is a standard Moodle page, a standard page in Moodle with some text and the text relates to the audio file. So the student would listen to the audio and follow along reading the text. And yeah, so that's listening and reading. But you can do better than that. Because if you go and use the mark the words H5P activity, then the student listens and as they're reading, they can highlight where the audio differs from the text that they're reading. And that's an activity there. Now it's not just audio. So for example, if you wanted to embed video, the usual way and an easy way is if you do it in a quiz, you just get the quiz description and you put your video into there and then you can follow on with some quiz questions related to it. But there are always those people who say, yeah, but how do we know if they've actually watched the video all the way through or they're not just guessing the questions? Well, that is when you should think of using the H5P interactive video because you can intersperse within the video some questions. So they're kind of obliged to watch it in order to go through and listen to the questions. OK. Moving on to speaking. And incidentally, I love that quote. Moving on to speaking, speaking, speaking then. Gosh, I can't speak as I'm talking about speaking. Ideally, if you're in an online or blended environment, you want to do some live synchronous speaking and something like our certified integration big blue button, which works great. You need to really think, though, about the lengths of your sessions. I'm learning Russian, studying Russian, and I actually have two lots of live online sessions each week. One of them on a Monday is an hour and a half is a one to one. And that is really intense. On a Thursday, I do two hours in a small group. And what's nice about the small group, and this is something you can do with big blue button when teaching languages, is, of course, you can use the breakout rooms to get your students having conversations amongst themselves to practice. And you can pop in and listen and check that they're OK. But you need to give very clear instructions as to the discussion topic they're going to use. And, of course, you can get some interactivity going with polls and so on. But if and when you can't always have the live sessions for practicing speaking, asynchronous speaking, you can still do that, for example, via Moodle forums where you can use those little auto editor buttons there. You can't speak for more than a couple of minutes, but then if you're trying to create a dialogue, that's a good idea, really. And you see we have an asynchronous dialogue going on there. In a forum, if you want to grade their speaking or evaluating it, you can pick up each of their posts and you can grade them even with a rubric. So Mark here is being graded with a standard rubric for teaching languages. And while we're talking about rubrics then and grading, of course, we need to remember that Moodle's assignment, lends itself perfectly to assessing speaking. If you use, for example, just one way, the online text assignment and they can post a sound file there. And the teacher can use the rubric, they can type a personalised comment or they could even record their own voice going back to it. But sometimes we don't always want to have to assess the student. We want them to take a bit more control and to reflect and assess and self-evaluate. So this is where something like as a really neat pair of plug-ins, I think from the Open University, work well together. So this is the record audio question type plug-in. And this works in a similar way to the two auto buttons. So a student's being given a task in a quiz here, they need to speak for two minutes about their hometown. They record it and then if you combine this with the self-assessment question behaviour plug-in, they can then listen and comment and give feedback on their own performance, what they think about it and even rate themselves. So that puts a little bit of the onus on them and that's really useful. Now if we are talking about self-assessment and if we are talking about language teaching, of course we have to mention poodle because this is brilliant for language teachers. I'm not going to go into a lot of details about various poodle activities because Justin Hunt, the poodle man himself, does a great job of presenting and explaining about them. But for instance, while we're talking about speaking, there is the poodle solo and this is a kind of auto graded speaking where you can see here. The student has been given a speaking topic so they prepare it, they're told some, given some target words or phrases which they should try to incorporate into their speaking. And then they can perform it, speak it, listen, transcribe and then there is an element of auto grading and of course the teacher can go in and override that and so on. So that's one of the many ways of poodle helping teachers to teach languages. Let's move on to reading now. The first thing I want to say about reading and that's in general is that if you're teaching any kind of languages at all through poodle and the app, if you're allowed to, why not get your students to switch the language of poodle to the language they're learning? Or if you're allowed to do it in your course, force the language, you can also get them to do that on their mobile phone. I did that when I first started learning Russian. I thought it was a good idea and it is. It's just that it was a new phone anyway and people would call me and message me and I would keep clicking the wrong buttons and doing something wrong because I didn't understand the instructions. But eventually you get there and it's a nice kind of subliminal way of seeing and reading the language that you're learning. Now, if you start with reading, if we will start at the very, very low level of single words, learning single words, you've got H5P dialogue cards. They're nice for a picture and a word, a flip them over, single words. There is also this is a plugin for the quiz quest ordering question type. And I believe this is one of the plugins that Gordon Bateson, who's a language teacher in Japan has made and Japanese English language teachers do a lot of contributions towards language teaching in Moodle. And with this one, what the student must do, and it's single words here, simply put the days of the week in the correct order. Now, when you move from single words to sentences, for example, this is the same question type, but this time there are sentences in a dialogue. And so the student must drag and drop those sentences so that the dialogue makes sense. And still talking about reading and going back to poodle for a moment. It's not just reading in silence to yourself. There's also reading aloud, and so there's a read aloud option with poodle. And of course, yes, so this is your reading, and you're speaking your pronunciation, your intonation, your fluency. For example, here there's a poem, and the student can listen and follow a model so they could do it a sentence at a time, checking as they go along, or they can again read aloud the whole poem and be assessed for their fluency and so on. Back to standard Moodle though, and if you remember I was talking about subliminal reading. Well, if you add a glossary, and then you include in the glossary some vocabulary or phrases that are important at the time, then you can then put them in the random glossary entry block. And so students are see, you know, they are faced with words either each day as we've got here, or each time they come to the Moodle course. And of course, you can also, if you want to, record the pronunciation of a particular word in your glossary block. And still, while we're on standard Moodle, because there's lots you can do in standard Moodle, the database activity is quite tricky to set up, but there are lots of useful presets already made by contributors. And if you go to archive.moodle.net, you'll find this one. And this one was contributed by Dearborn Public Schools in the USA, and it's vocabulary learning with the Freya model. And basically what you have is you have the means to set up some vocabulary practice like this. So we've got a word predator in the middle there. And then if you click on definition, you get its definition, you have to input this, but the setup, the preset is done. You get its image. You can get an example of how it is used. And then in the last one, it depends on how you want to play it, you can have the translation into the native language of your learners. Or, and online I've seen other examples of using this, for instance, ways where it's not appropriate to use it, but personally I don't like examples of bad examples, but you have those options. So that's reading. Let's look at writing now. So again, if we start at the very, very beginning with simple writing, we go back to H5P and we've got flashcards here. So at the very beginning of your learning, now I remember when I taught languages, we used to have flashcards. I used to hand draw them and then eventually we got some professional ones made of cardboard and you would show one side that the students would guess you'd flip it over. Works brilliantly. You can do lots of games with it as well. Now there's lots of online flashcards such as this H5P1. So the students see the image, they write the word. Pachetallion. I'm just saying that to see how it transcribes. Pachetallion. But you did, you never mind, never mind. Which is Russian for postman. Let's check it. Yep, we got it right so we can move on to the next one. A little bit more advanced, you can do fill in the blanks. Now there are quite a few fill in the blanks options standard and contributed. And I must just at this point say that Marcus Green has done quite a few contributed quiz question types that are really good for language teaching. And I'm saying that because if I don't say it, I know he will. So do check out Marcus Green's contributions as well. But I quite like this fill in the blanks H5P where again it's simple to set up. And so we add the correct verb form and then we check nearly right. The first one is a common mistake by people who's first language is not English. Now something else that is old, old habit from thousands of years ago, but I still think it's a good one to do is dictation. H5P has really nice dictation tool. And again, this is, as I said at the start, listening because you, the teacher, you need to upload a sound file of a word or a sentence. And then the student writes it down. So we're checking their spelling and their knowledge of the words. Once we get a bit further on a bit more advanced and we're writing paragraphs, we can go into essays. This is Moodle standard essay question in the quiz and something that's new in Moodle 3.11 is that you can set a minimum and a maximum word count in the essay. And then if students write less fewer than or more than those limits, they are reminded and they have to change it. You can use this or you should use this in combination with the utter word count so they actually know how many words they're trying to submit. And if you think they need a bit of support, you can scaffold this by using the response template in the essay question, which I really like. Even if it's only to give them headings for each of their paragraphs or suggested topics or an order in which to work. But of course, if you're doing this essay question, you've got to mark it manually, which is a bit of a drag. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could have essay questions automatically graded? Well, we're almost there. H5P has an essay auto grading question and basically how this works is the student writes or types their essay. And then once they check it, they can see how many phrases or words they've included or not, which you were hoping that they would. So you, the teacher in advance, you input certain useful or relevant phrases. And as you couple of them, they missed out a couple of important ones. But this is a nice halfway house, if you like, of doing you. There's another, there is another one. I do hope you can hear me actually. So I just see my internet connection is unstable. I'm going to carry on. There is another one, which is a bit more advanced. And that is again a quiz plug-in from Gordon Bateson, which is the essay auto grading plug-in. This does a similar thing, but it's a slightly more detailed level. So as you can see here, again, the student submits and then according to what they included target phrases or what they didn't include. This has a bearing on the grade they're going to get. So this is partially graded and then the teacher goes in and does the rest of the grading there. So there are a lot of options as well. I've missed out loads of things, but as I said, we don't have a lot of time. But finally, I did want to mention two things that don't really fit in perfectly to any of the others. So I'm going to put them in at the end. And the first one is if you're involved in language teaching at any level in any way, be that English as a second language or other modern foreign languages, then you should be aware of the common European framework reference for languages, which is a competency framework used internationally, even though it says it's European. And I wrote up the English version of this and put it on archive.moodle.net a few years ago. So why not go and get it and get your admin to add it to your site so that you can actually bring in these levels into your language courses. And I think it's a very good way of defining where you are at different language levels. So when people say what languages do you speak, you can then say, well, I'm C1 French, I'm heading towards B2 in Russian, B1 slash B2 in German, A1 Spanish and so on. So if we finish talking about language teaching in general, it's not only Moodle, but if you have an interest in it in general and you use Twitter, do follow the hashtag MFL Twitterati, because there's not a lot of Moodle there, there is some, especially me, but it's all about in general ways of teaching languages, particularly since everyone pivoted, which I hate that word, online in lockdown last year, online and blended strategies and techniques and ideas at every level from primary school up to the organisations and universities in many different countries and different languages. So have a look at them, take a screenshot and tweet it if you want, but that's me done for now. And I also added a question in the forum for today for us to have discussions and so on.