Flax module

FLAX helps automate the production and delivery of practice exercises for learning English. You, the teacher, can easily create exercises from the textual content of digital libraries. You can also create your own digital library collections.

The FLAX module is a contributed activity module released for Moodle 1.9.x.

Activity Types

• Scrambled Sentences exercises - This exercise type asks students to move highlighted words into the correct position in a sentence.
• Word Guessing exercises - This exercise type asks students to type missing words into the correct place in a document.
• Predicting Words and Phrases exercises - This exercise type lets students brainstorm words and phrases pertinent to a particular topic.

Settings

• Exercise name
• Design exercise
• Manage my FLAX collections
• Maximum grade
• Open exercise
• Close exercise

Designing exercises

Teachers design exercises of each of the three types, based on the contents of a digital library collection. In all cases the design proceeds by filling out a simple form.

After you have designed scrambled sentences and word guessing exercises, you can review the exercise and override the system's choices about which sentences that have been chosen (for scrambled sentences) or which words have been omitted (for word guessing). This puts the teacher firmly in control! You can also create a printable version of the exercise.

Scrambled sentences

You can select which document, or documents, the sentences come from—either by naming the documents or by choosing their difficulty level. You can choose between simple (single clause) or complex (multiclause) sentences. You can restrict the sentences to active or passive voice, and specify what tense they should have or what modal verb they should contain. You can specify how many words the sentences should have. You can even give a word or words that the target sentences must contain.

You can determine how many sentences are in the exercises, the number of words to scramble, and whether the sentences should be presented in the same order or a random order that is different for every student.

Word guessing

You select a document (if you like, you can specify a difficulty level first). You can either choose the words to omit based on the gap size (and specify the gap size), or choose certain parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, or adjectives. You can select what kind of hint to give.

You can choose whether students work in individual mode, by themselves, or in class mode, in which case the entire class can compete by guessing words as quickly as possible. As soon as one class member guesses a word correctly the system updates everyone else's display to make that word unavailable for guessing. For a fair competition, get all your students to work together at the same time! The top three scoring students are shown on everyone's screen, and when you mouse over the scoreboard you see how everyone is doing. Class mode exercises also contain a chat facility that allows participants to type messages to one another.

Predicting words and phrases

This traditional pre-reading activity is particularly suitable for use in the classroom, in class mode. Students compete to guess as many relevant words as possible, which stimulates interest and facilitates comprehension before they begin reading. It can also be used to brainstorm suitable vocabulary for a forthcoming essay, or serve as a retrospective activity where learners recall and review a list of expressions and collocations that are important for accurately expressing ideas relevant to a topic.

You create it just like the other exercise types. Select a document (if you like, you can specify a difficulty level first). You can determine what kinds of words should not be presented for guessing (by default conjunctions, modal verbs, proper nouns, personal pronouns, prepositions and determiners are excluded from guessing). You can choose whether students see just the article title or the first paragraph as well. For this exercise, class mode is the default.

Grading

All FLAX exercises can be used in Practice mode or Graded mode, as specified in the Maximum Grade part of the Moodle form that you see when you select Add a FLAX language learning exercise. In "Practice mode" Scrambled Sentences exercises (like the ones given above) students can click Check answer to see which words they have got right and Next question to go to the next sentence. In "Graded mode" there is just a single button: Check answer and go to next question.

The FLAX server

FLAX operates within Moodle but communicates with an external digital library server. The FLAX project in New Zealand has arranged for a demo server to be available to all Moodle users on a trial basis. The server is open source code that can be easily downloaded and installed. It runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac. You specify the server address when you install the Moodle FLAX module.

Building your own digital library collection

FLAX is distributed with a few standard digital library collections. All the exercises above used the Best of Password. When you create an exercise, you choose the collection it is based on and the exercise type.

See also

• moodle.org discussion link to come! - discuss the module here
• cvs repository link to come! - browse and download the code
• module and plugin dbase link to come - FLAX Module entry at moodle.org