Merry Christmas!!

Hello my peers,

I wish you all a Merry Merry Christmas!!!

Love,

Silvia

My Personal Learning Environment

Well, I must admit that I was a bit struck when last Wednesday Sarah told us that most of our learning comes from informal contexts and that only the 20% of what we learn takes place in formal contexts...could you have ever imagined that what we learn formally plays such a little role in our learning process?! During the last few days I’ve really thought a lot about it and I’ve realized how it’s incredibly true… just think about how much you can improve your language learning by just talking with native speakers or by reading a newspaper article for example…don’t you agree?
Moreover, Sarah pointed out that our learning should be an ongoing process: if we want to see improvements in our learning we should find an effective way that enable us to constantly practice the language. Therefore, it is important that we start reflecting on our personal learning environment, i.e. on how to categorize the contexts and the tools which for us are the best ways to strengthen our skills!
After spending quite a long time thinking about how to build my personal mindmap, I decided to focus mainly on six areas: formal and informal language learning, gathering information, acting on learning, experience and free time.
Formal language learning: In our case, it deals mainly with lectures at University and the tools which help us in our formal learning, such as online and paper dictionaries, grammar books and specific websites.
Informal language learning: I think there is a wide variety of contexts in which we can learn informally, among them I mentioned Teacher Tube (in which I usually find very interesting and educational videos!), conversation with native speakers, newspapers and podcasts, which are an endless resource for our learning!
Gathering information: When I have to do some research, I look for information in the Web, using search engines, del.icio.us or the usual library catalogues.
Acting on learning: doing the activities on the blog and discussing with my peers during the lessons help me see how much my learning is improving!
Experience: the Erasmus experience I had and the cultural exchanges I took part in play a fundamental role in my learning process because they made it possible for me to get in touch with people from all over Europe and with their culture..I think that such experiences are the best way to strengthen our language learning, definitely!
Free time: it is the most suitable context in which I can learn a lot of things by just sitting in my bedroom listening to music, chatting with friends via messenger and travelling (when I can!).

I hope you could see my mindmap..sorry Sarah, but I wasn’t able to download FreeMind (I still don’t know why!)
Bye!

Analyzing online information sources...

source

How can we effectively evaluate online information? Certainly, it is not as easy as it seems...

Browsing through the three websites Sarah suggested us, I’ve become aware of how important it is to learn how to evaluate the huge amount of information we daily find on the Internet! So what criteria should we use to distinguish good information from bad? How can we get out of such a big mess!?
After spending some time reading the tips of the University of Essex, I’ve come across a lot of useful suggestions on how to work out a method to evaluate online resources! Here is what I’ve come up with…
Well, if we have to do some research for our next thesis, a good way to start with is asking ourselves: where should we start looking? Is the information we are looking for only retrievable in the Internet? If this is the case, what we need is a good search engine…so we should forget Google or AltaVista as they give far too much information which might be misleading; in this case, what we need is a meta search engine (such as dogpile, search) or a specialized search engine (like Google scholar), which can refine the information retrieved in a more effective way! :-) Surprisingly, I found out that the University of Essex provides its students with free online services (like Intute), thanks to which they have access to the best web resources for education and research...great, isn't it?!

Moreover, what we have to be careful in evaluating the quality of a website is the authorship, i.e. who is the author, what are his credentials and if he/she had past writing experience in the field: when writing my thesis this was one of the first things I checked in order to be sure that what I found was trustworthy and at the same time worth reading.
A criterion I’ve always followed is that of evaluating the credibility of a website as well: in each new website we come across we should check if the home page displays the name and the logo of the institution or organization who provided the information, and if the website is frequently reviewed by the editors. Therefore, it is always important to have a look at when the information was published and when it was last updated. So we’d better not use undated sites if we are looking for recent information! ;-) In addition, we should be capable of verifying the kind of information we are retrieving, i.e. if it is based on facts or on opinions, which is not always easy to establish when reading through online material.

One think I didn’t pay attention to was the quality of the inner organization of a website: the information provided in the homepage should be easily accessible to everyone, even to the more inexpert people; moreover, a website should have external links which can help you retrieve more information about the topic of interest to you, as well as an internal search engine would be useful for the websites which contain a huge amount of information, so that more relevant material can be recovered. In addition, the content of a website should be as complete and accurate as possible.
The criterion of peer-evaluation was not unknown to me: anyway, I think it is essential in order to make sure of the quality of the information presented...Actually, I may trust more a website which has been highly rated than one which is not! ;-)

That’s all for now,

Bye girls, see you on Monday!

YouTube..a way to share your videos!

Well, it is not the first time I heard about YouTube, but I must confess that I never visited this website until last Wednesday! So before exploring the YouTube dimension I went searching for information just for curiosity’s sake and I found out that you tube provides 100 million videos per day..could you ever have imagined that?

Once I entered YouTube, I was simply struck by the number of videos and things I came across in this HUGE website!!! I spent hours visiting it because I couldn’t resist the temptation to click on the links that I found here and there on the webpage and watch the videos that caught my attention! ;-)

What I liked the most of this website is that it is organized by categories according to the topic (for example cars, animals, films) where you can find any video which can be of interest to you; however, that’s not all! YouTube is also a way to filter videos, making it possible for you to know which are the most recent, the most discussed, the most responded, and even which videos can be uploaded on your mobile phone..isn’t it fantastic!?

Moreover, I consider this new digital tool to be far better than television: YouTube enhances us to make our own contribution to develop it by creating videos, sharing them with people from all over the world and have our own say, instead of just sitting in front of the screen passively as it happens with television. In addition, the fact that it’s users and not show producers who make and broadcast their own videos makes anything more real and personal and it enables you to know more about people of our age (since most of the videos are broadcast by young people), their lifestyle, how they cope with everyday problems and what they think about certain issues such as politics, health care and so on.

Obviously, we have to pay attention to use this tool, as when surfing the Web, because in YouTube you can find a lot of videos and comments which are not filtered by moderators so they might contain vulgar and rude images or expressions. In fact, another thing that I appreciated of YouTube is the chance of creating a group in which it’s only the people subscribed to it who can post videos and comments..good way of filtering, isn’t it?

Moreover, YouTube is a useful way to improve our English language learning: by watching the videos and reading people’s comments you can learn a lot of colloquial expressions! Some curious words I found were: convo which stands for conversation; luv for love; huppy for happy; cuz for because; vid for video.
Since I’ve recently become really curious about what concerns technology and new digital tools in general (also thanks to this course!), I searched in TeacherTube and I came across this video, which immediately caught my attention: it explains in a very clear and plain English how to use wiki, a new tool which enables groups of users to create collaborative websites..enjoy! ;-)

If you can't watch the video, please click on this link:

http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=b7a75a3ce09d40b497f6&page=5&viewtype=&category=rf

and it should appear.

Let me know what you think of it!

Bye!

Exploring the world of podcasts...

PODCASTS...somewhere I’ve already heard of them, but this is certainly the first time I get in touch with this new tool Sarah suggested to us! Well, I have to say that searching for some interesting podcasts at first took me a lot of time because I couldn't easily find, open and download the podcasts I wanted to listen to, maybe because of my old computer... but finally, guys, I got it! :-D

Exploring the search engines Google, Odeo and del.icio.us, I was really struck by the number of podcasts I found and I must confess that it was very hard for me to choose only three of them…anyway, I hope you find them interesting and useful for your English learning! ;-)

The first website I chose to visit is betteratenglish because it’s very well-organized and clear: podcasts are divided into sections according to categories, topics and levels, so even an inexpert learner can easily find what he/she is searching for! Besides, the latest podcasts are separated from the less recent ones, which you can find under the section archives..so if you miss an episode of a podcast you were particularly interested in, you can immediately find it by simply clicking on the link!
I chose to click on Real English conversations and I listened to an informal discussion about television between a British and an American English Native speaker, in particular dealing with tv commercials: I found it very useful because through a simple dialogue I've learnt important differences between British ad American English (such as talking about advertising, Americans say commercials while British people say adverts) as well as phrasal verbs I didn’t know (i.e. to go about, put up with, see through it) and idioms, like don’t get me started, which means that if you start talking about a certain topic, nobody will be able to stop you!

Moreover, besides podcasts concerning everyday situations, you can also find those dealing with business English: I listened to some of them (try this just for curiosity’s sake!) and I must say that despite what I thought, they can be understood without any difficulty and very useful to enlarge our business vocabulary as well! ;-)

To listen to more informal podcasts, from this website I went to www.china232.com, which was created by two American guys: even though it’s not as complete and well-organized as the first one, I really liked it because there are a lot of interesting and funny podcasts: each of them include the transcript of the podcasts added with explanations of complicated words and expressions as well as further discussions about the topic! This way, they perfectly combine fun with learning! For example, I listened to a conversation about vacation plans, which tells the problem of a guy who wants to postpone his trip to Hawaii but the travel agent refused permission, saying that the trip was non-refundable and non-transferable. I think this podcast is very useful because there are very clear explanations of the words and idioms with plenty of examples taken from everyday language (for example to explain the meaning of the expression to bend the rules and something came up). Moreover, for each podcast a further discussion about the topic is provided, so that you can get a deeper understanding of the situation and know a little bit more about American culture. What else could you want??! ;-)

Finally, the third website I visited was eslpod.com: it offers a wide variety of interesting and informal podcasts dealing with common situations which can be easily understood by any kind of learners. Among them I chose to listen to this, in which husband and wife have a discussion about the character of their neighbor: by simply listening to this brief conversation I’ve learnt a lot of new sayings and words, such as to shoot the breeze (i.e. to have a conversation in an informal way), busybody (i.e. a person who is too interested in what other people are doing) and to be entitled to something (i.e. to have the right to do something). Besides, the fact that they speak very slow helped me a lot to have a more complete understanding!

Let me know what you think about the three podcasts I chose,
See you soon!
bye

DEL.ICIO.US...What a wonderful tool!!!

Again I’ve learnt something that was completely new to me, i.e. DEL.ICIO.US!!! It is a fantastic example of what is called social bookmarking, which is a new way to store and organize your favorite websites. You might think that there is nothing new in it as you can easily do it from your computer at home..however, my dear peer, if you think so, you are completely wrong! Through del.icio.us you can bookmark and have access to your favorites from anywhere you are, not just from your computer! And that’s not all…del.icio.us enables you to share them with your peers as well as with all the people subscribed to it..I can hardly believe it!!! Moreover, del.icio.us is a very useful tool in order to filter out the huge amount of information you can daily found on the Internet, which may often be unreliable, unnecessary and even misleading. From the notes you find under each website suggested by the members of del.icio.us you can easily retrieve what it is about, how many people saved it (and therefore whether they consider it useful or not!) and if it might be of interest to you: if so, you can save it in “your favorites” and have access to it anytime you want…isnt’ it fantastic??!!! Besides, del.icio.us offers another great advantage: it enables users to organize their bookmarks by means of informal tags instead of traditional folders! By simply typing a keyword, like blogging, or English for example, you can find the websites of interest to you and cluster them into lists organized by tags…can you really imagine what it means?! Moreover, you can decide with whom you want to share your websites, i.e. if you want to share them publicly or only with people you chose to put in your networks: they can view them by category or tags, in chronological order simply randomly..Have you seen how many things you can do with del.icio.us??!! :-)

After spending some time exploring the world of del.ici.ous, I had a look at my peers’ favorites and I must say that all of you girls chose very interesting and original websites!! Basically, I've noticed that all of us are mainly interested in websites regarding online dictionaries or those which include a lot of grammar exercises, writing and listening activities; however, we also try exploring some other levels of English, i.e. searching for the origin of words and idioms or for particular techniques to improve our conversational skills.
For example, Elena mainly focused on online dictionaries: this is the website I've appreciated the most because I always have problems to choose the right preposition which can combine with the verb!
Among Giada’s choices I found this website particularly useful because it really offers a huge variety of listening activities according to the level of our English; moreover, most of the tasks include pre and post-listening activities which help you have a more complete understanding of the topic discussed.
As fas as Letizia’s favorites are concerned, this website immediately caught my attention because it gives very useful tips on how to avoid unpleasant hesitations and sounds while speaking to people! Therefore, if you’re going to become a teacher or just want to improve your conversational skills, you’d better follow them! ;-)
Finally, among Zara’s choices I think that this website is worth visiting because it includes a very interesting forum in which English/American Native speakers discuss about the origin of words of common use, such as politician or t-shirt..it's really interesting reading through their comments!!

I’m looking forward to reading your impressions !

Bye!!!