national geographic

More teaching and learning links

Thanks for the brilliant work you did writing about the websites. Useful for us all. And don't forget to check out the DFilm movies and the Voicethreads people made.

You can see the information, films etc from the other groups here:
Group A (Jo's): http://nilemgea.blogspot.com/
Group B (Carole's): http://nilemgeb.blogspot.com/
Group C (Jamie's): http://mgecnile.blogspot.com/

Some greedy people asked for more websites to use for learning and teaching! Here is a page of links from my website, The English Language Garden:
http://www.elgweb.net/t_links.html

I'm hoping to update this at the end of August - but I'll be adding to it rather than deleting any (unless they've become bad links). One of the sites I'll definitely add then is the award-winning TEFLclips written by a man called Jamie Keddie who you may have heard of. http://www.teflclips.com/ (Group A - remember Mairzy Doats?)

Links to loads of material for Interactive Whiteboards at http://www.elgweb.net .

And if your English spelling is a bit iffy, take a look at my blog The Spelling Blog at http://thespellingblog.blogspot.com/

And what about you? Have you got a blog or website that we can look at? Or do you know other useful sites? Please post them here.

Improve your listening

See the Concepcion post about it

VOICETHREAD TOOL

This is a tool for talking about, sharing images, documents, videos and many others things.

For example, you can browse a videoclip recorded by anybody, listening to the comments recorded by other people and express your own opinion about it. So you can use this tool either to teach or to learn.

This is also a very good and useful tool to improve your listening skills in English. By listening to different opinions you pick up knowledge about different kinds of subjects you are interested in.

As you can record your own voice, you have to pay special attention to avoid making mistakes because you have to be understood by anybody. As a result you can improve your speaking skills in English.

This tool has got a lot of facilities. For instance:
- You can insert any comment, picture, document, sound, video, ..., and share them with your friends by e-mail or embed on iGoogle, My Space, FaceBook, Blogger, Yahoo, ...
- You can make doodlines. It is possible to stop a video clip while playing and then make some marks with a pen on that video and finally record it again. That is to say, you are allowed to modify the original video and adapt it to your needs.

The link you can visit in order to get more informatiion about this amazing tool is the following:

http://voicethread.com/


By Antonio & Juan Carlos

"BBC NEWS VERSUS BREAKING NEWS"

The two sites that we have checked are so different:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/language/wordsinthenews/
and
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/index.html

The first one is the authentic speaking that you can hear on news.

The second one has been designed for English learnes in order to improve their knwoledge of the language.

If you go to the "BBC learning" web, first of all you can choose the news and later, read and listen at the same time with their own accents. Besides, you can also find at the end of the page, specific and difficult words with the explanation and the pronunciation.

By contrast, listening "Breaking News English" you will hear specific presenters speaking slowly and also in a more formal way of learning English with exercises and different tasks.
So, if you want to learn about Grammar, go to the second web and if you prefer real accents go to the first one.
This report has been written by Isabel and Cati.

LEARNING SOUNDS FAMILIAR?

This website is about accents and dialects of UK. In this site you can click on the map to hear how pronunciation varies across the UK and, also, you can get more information, like influences, history,...

You can also listen over 600 short audio clips from different parts of UK. There are transcripts of every of them.

In the website you have some sections: activities, regional voices, changing voices, your voices, case studies. For example the activities consist of grammatical change, lexical change, lexical variation, methodology, etc.

www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/index.html

By Lorenzo and Jose.

To improve your listening skill

In this website you can find clips that show ideas that are worth spreading concerning different subjects like technology, global problems, science, entertainment, and so on.
Morover, the interface is really nice and it is easy to find clips of whatever topic you are interested in. Added to this, it is a useful tool to improve your listening skills in English.


I would like to highly recommend this clip because it concerns the reason why so many people are nowadays interested in studying English. The clip shows that the country most interested in studying English is China. They are making a big effort to learn the language.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_walker_on_the_world_s_english_mania.html

This clip is very interesting specially for health and science teachers. It is about a pediatrician who has invented a device to harvest bone marrow. He called it "Marrow miner". Its advantages are that doctors get more marrow, only one puncture is needed and they do not need general anaesthesia. Bone marrow is transplanted in people that suffer from leukemia and others blood illnesses.

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kraft_invents_a_better_way_to_harvest_bone_marrow.html


Inma y Virginia

INTERESTING AND USEFUL WEBSITES TO LEARN ENGLISH

1. http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
This is a website where you can find information about different subjects in easy, brief English.

2. http://www.googlefight.com
This is a website where you can compare the use of two words. How can we do that? Write two words, for example 'persons' and 'people', click the button 'Make a fight' and then on our screen we can see the number of times that each word appears on Internet. This website is useful to know the proper word to use.

3. http://www.howjsay.com/
This website is very useful for learning English because you can listen to the pronunciation of an specific word. You need a headset to listen to this one.
There are other tools to do this task, for example the English On Line Dictionaries.

Good Luck!!

Conchi and Marivi.

Monday afternoon's lesson

Websites and web tools to help your English:

Group 1. Explore these sites:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/language/wordsinthenews/

and

http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/index.html

Write about theses two sites on our blog. (Put in links to the sites) Describe and compare them. Which do you think is more useful to help your colleagues improve their English? Why?

Group 2. Explore this site:

http://www.dfilm.com/live/moviemaker.html

You can make a movie here. To save it you need to register.

Write about the site on our blog (link to the site). And if possible embed your movie. Say how difficult it was to make. How do you think this could be useful to help your colleagues improve their English?

Group 3. Look at this site and choose one talk to watch that interests you :

http://www.ted.com/

Write a short summary of the talk you watched (include the link) . What other types of talks were available that might interest your colleagues? Write about it on our blog.

Group 4. Look at these three sites:

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

How is this different from the normal English Wikipedia site? How useful is it?

http://www.googlefight.com/

Describe what Googlefight does? In what situations could it be useful for you and your colleagues?

http://www.howjsay.com/

How useful do you think this site is? Do you know any other tools that are useful for language learners?

Write about all these questions on our blog. Remember to link to the sites.

Group 5. Spend a bit of time exploring this site:

www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/index.html

Then write about it on our blog. Describe the site and say what it does (don't forget to link to it). Did you find any interesting information on it?

Group 6. Look at this site:

http://voicethread.com/

Spend a bit of time exploring and, if you want to, you can leave some comments or even register and make your own Voicethread (you will need some photos – ask Jo if you haven’t got any).

Then write about Voicethread on our blog. Describe it and say how people use it. How do you think it could be useful for practising your English? Put in links to interesting examples and of course the main site.

Norwich: The accent and place names

In relation to the Norwich accent, yesterday We were walking around Norwich. We met a man who told us that the people of Norwich have a "farmer's accent or a country one". After speaking to him I believed that was really true. But other classmates told us that they had been speaking to a gang of teenagers and they haven't any problems. They understand them very well. However, another mate said to me that they speak fast and miss out words speaking. All in all, I think that We can undestand them well.

The place names are Happisburgh, a Norkfold seaside town, Wymoudham, a small town near Norwich an Costessey, a suburb of Norwich.

Conchi Flores Maria