Tips and Tricks - Diving into Moodle Glossaries

One of my favorite default Moodle features is the Glossary. I've worked with classrooms that use it to highlight the "food of the day", student profiles, websites and resources of interest in professional development settings and vocab words and key terms in classroom settings. There is so much you can do!

Additionally, the Glossary is an incredibly versatile tool because you can allow student editing access to the module by modifying the local roles; so students can add entries as well. Here's an excerpt from a great post at Digmo.co.uk that highlights what they like about the Glossary:

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.

Here's a course that I made to illustrate the Moodle Glossary and how you can hook up a "random Glossary entry" block to display a different entry every day, week, month during your course: Exploring the Moodle Glossary. Note that the course layout is made with Glogster, a free site where you can create dynamic, flashy-looking, interactive and embeddable web content.

If you'd just like to download the nifty XML file with over 50 free resources for teachers just click here.