The ExplorNet CareerTech Blog

Kathy Tarlton
West Montgomery High School

This past year I took on teaching a couple of courses that I had never taught before in the Business area. My VoCATs scores left a bit to be desired during the first semester. This unsuccessful bout with VoCATs drove me to look for ways to improve my scores.

In the second semester I tried a couple of new things that really paid off for me. One thing I tried that really seemed to pay off doing was making flash cards for my students to use for vocabulary. (Not really high tech, huh!) Anyway, this caused me to go to the Moodle guru, Geof Duncan, to see what he might know about flash cards for moodle. I also refer affectionately to him as URL man because he always comes back with some site for me to look at. What he sent me was a link for the games plugin for Moodle. Well, once I figured out this existed, I knew this was something CET teachers would love to have added to the QTL Moodle site and so I got on my knees and begged our resident guru to install it for us. Kudos to Geof for getting it there for us!

Since its installation, I have played a bit with “Millionaire”, which as it sounds is like “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”. You have to create a quiz and then associate the quiz with your millionaire game. This is a great way to review the VoCATs questions and each student can get a slightly different version because of randomizing the questions.

I also created a “Crossword” out of vocabulary. Now I know that we already have crosswords and but I know the teachers might want to switch things up a little and this is a way you can create your own crosswords from your own modified vocabulary lists. In order to make the crossword game work, I created a glossary and then linked the glossary to a crossword game.

While doing a Google search I found a kewl link on www.teachertube.com, a highly awesome site that we ought to post more and more things to for helping our peers, for the moodle games module. Here’s the link for the video I found. While I haven’t explored the entire games module myself, this guy does a great job explaining how to use the various options of the module. So enjoy the new module and send your donations to Geof for making our site so awesome! (j/k! – just kidding, for those of you not into texting)