Activities-Glossary
Content
The Glossary tool Adding a Glossary Adding a Category Adding a Glossary Entry
The Glossary tool
A glossary, in its basic form, adds a word list to your course, which students can use for quick reference/explanations about difficult or field related terms. The glossary should not turn into a full dictionary (students have better dictionary resources at their disposal than we could ever offer them in a course!), but limit itself to terms specific to the subject. In language courses the choice of terms can be somewhat wider. The Moodle glossary offers far more options (such as related keywords, the creation of categories and autolinking) than the average glossary tool and it can be used in many more ways. A Moodle course allows you to create more than one glossary, a main glossary and one or more secondary glossaries. You have the option to allow students to add entries to these secondary glossaries, for example when in the process of creating a glossary for a course, you could let students list the words they found difficult, with the explanation they came up with. After editing their entries, you can choose to add these entries to your main glossary. Entries can be shown anonymously, or with the name of the author, depending on the display format you choose. It is possible in Moodle to link glossary entries automatically to course materials (so that they become clickable links that will bring up a pop-up window with the glossary explanation) and you can decide per entry, whether you want it linked or not. The downside is that in Moodle the glossary entry will be linked automatically to all instances of the word in the entire course, including forum messages, book and lesson pages and the descriptions of all tools. This involves a risk, as words can have many meanings: the glossary entry may focus on one meaning and then be linked to instances where the word means something else. Therefore, you should be careful as to which words to link (limit yourself preferably to specific field related vocabulary, or else use the "no link" icon in the toolbar of the HTML editor to stop automatic glosary links to certain words). The use of the text editor in Moodle makes it possible to create encyclopaedic entries containing pictures and links to internal and external resources. It is even possible to use the glossary tool to create a secondary glossary that functions as a database, i.e. students can upload files there (using the attachment option) and download the files of others, although for this purpose the Database tool is better suited. The Moodle glossary also allows users to comment on each other's entries and to assess entries using a ratings system similar to that in the Forum tool.
Adding a Glossary
Adding a glossary in Moodle displays the following settings screen:
Once you have created a glossary, you (or, in the case of a secondary glossary, your students) can add entries to the glossary. If you have a large and many-sided list, or you want to help your students to distinguish between files or text types, you can start by creating Categories (for example, in a secondary glossary used to list recipes, categories can include: hors d’oevres, soups and sauces, meat dishes, fish and sea food, vegetarian dishes and desserts). To add a category you would click the "Browse by category" tab on the glossary page and then click the Edit categories button:
When you have thus prepared your glossary, you can add entries to it. If you have a ready-made glossary (e.g. a previously exported XML file), you can import it. Otherwise you will have to add the entries one by one. Adding
a Glossary Entry
To add an entry to a glossary, click Add a new entry and fill in the required information the the screen below:
A finished simple glossary page (in this case a secondary glossary with comments allowed) with an entry displayed can look something like this (This view is from Moodle 1.6; in 1.8 the import/export links at at the top right on the entry page):