Sunday, November 11, 2007

Del.icio.us


Hi girls!!
Now here we are to talk about social bookmarks like del.icio.us. As the time before, when we started using feeds and feeds aggregator, I have to admit that I heard something about them only when our teacher Sarah introduced our English course. But we’re here to learn, and the last time in the lab we became a little bit confident with this technological tool, that is del.icio.us. In the lab I felt a little bit lost, but at the end I was able to create my list of bookmarks and my network. I think this is a useful way to share with my group of peer sites of our interest, that can help us during the course. In fact, we had to find websites that dealt with language learning and I found, among others, five interesting sites to improve my reading and listening skills. For example, in Voice of America’s website you have the possibility to listen to the radio! Funny and useful! Moreover, there are websites about mistakes in English and they suggest you strategies not to commit them, and there are websites that help you with grammar, verbs and English constructions. You also have the possibility to do online exercises and activities, so it’s like having an online teacher and grammar book! And the helpful things is that they give you immediately the solution to the exercises you made, so they’re really useful way to check when we want our abilities…and also our limits in English language.
As far as the bookmarks of my peers are concerned, I found them all interesting.
I liked the one suggested by Cristina, about common errors in English, because in the site there is a list of words – divided in alphabetical order – that can easily be used with wrong meanings. You just click on the word you want to check and it’s given a brief explanation of that word and of its usage.
Then I found really funny the site proposed by Monica. It’s about English slang and colloquialism. I haven’t ever thought that there was a dictionary of slang, but it exists! Just clicking on the letter, there is a list of words beginning with that letter. I clicked on “A” and the first word reported is “abdabs”… Do you know what it means? Terror… I think that this site is useful to get us closer to the real spoken use of English, and it’s interesting because, since slang change a lot in the passing of time, people can submit any slang for inclusion in the dictionary.
Also the site proposed by Elisa is helpful. It gives an explanation of English language, from where it derived, the English alphabet, the pronunciation… This last part is the most useful because I still have problems with pronunciation… I think it’s a common problem among us, since we’re Italian native speakers and we have our own accent, but I hope to improve my pronunciation, maybe taking a look from the links connected with this site.
I found useful the site proposed by Elena, about English punctuation. I found it helpful because the usage of punctuation in Italian and in English differs a lot and I still make little mistakes. In the site they explain the basic rules of using a period, comma, colon, semicolon, question mark and exclamation point.
Bye girls!

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