Glossaries in Moodle
Over the last few weeks we have been exploring some of the less obvious yet massively advantageous activities available in Moodle courses. One of my personal favourites is the brilliant Glossary feature. The glossary allows teachers (and students) to build up definitions of key terms used within the course.
The benefits don’t end with a simple alphabetic list in fact Moodle offers massive value for how the terms are used. Firstly lets look at how to set up a Glossary within a course. Log in to your course and ‘turn editing on’. Click the ‘Add an Activity’ option and chose ‘Glossary’. Once you have named your glossary you are met with a number of options that offer a brilliant range of custom features.
You have to decide how you want the glossary to work. You can limit it so that only course editors can add entries to the system or alternatively you can allow students to enter definitions (that can then be approved my editors).
You can offer a rating system for definitions and even limit the rating so that only teachers can reward the entries.
One really nice feature is the ability for Moodle to analyse your resources (web pages, text files and forum posts) and if it finds words or terms in your glossary it will create a hyperlink to that actual glossary entry.
Personally I restrict glossary entries to the teacher user level. I started with only ten definitions and as I updated the VLE course I updated the glossary as I went.
I now have nine pages of definitions that your pupils can print, learn and I have opted for a term of the day on the front page of the course.
This is one of my favourite features. As you can see from the screenshot to the right we have an ICT term of the day.
The BBC Tech is an RRS feed directly from the BBC Technology pages but under this is a daily glossary entry. You can complete control over how regularly the definition updates (and the title) but it is a really nice way of offering the definitions to the students and a great question to ask “Anyone know what the ICT term of the day is ?”
This encourages students to check it out each time they visit the course.
In Moodle Glossaries can also be exported to XML which means you can share your work with other schools or course leaders. How great would it be if we shared our Glossary exports ?
Glossary units are really easy to set up and a definition of the day will work with any number of entries. A year of adding new definitions has resulted in a really useful resource for students especially when it comes to exam revision.
The glossary can also be printed for revision purposes although one thing to note is the user must click the ALL view option (see the screen shot above) for the entire glossary to print, otherwise it simply prints the first page.
Anyone made their glossaries available to share ?
Can you please provide the link to the ICT term of the day? I cannot seem to find it. Also, how do you integrate it into Moodle?