...podcasting

When I first read the title of our e-tivity 6 I was a little worried. I started thinking: “Podcasts…what are they? Will I be supposed to use another tool for feed aggregation, posting or doing something still unknown to me?”. But soon I realized that I had already listened to that word before. But where or when? I still can’t remember. Maybe I just used podcasts without knowing what they exactly were. Anyway, the most important thing is that NOW I have a clear idea of what a podcast is: it is a media file which can be downloaded from the net to your personal computer or mp3 player. In this way you can listen to or watch it whenever you prefer or just when you need it. This kind of file is spreading a lot lately and many sites offer their own podcasts about a huge amount of topics (radio or TV shows, private messages, university lectures, amateur music groups and so on).

Apart from music, TV and radio, I think that podcasts can be really useful for us as English learners. A huge quantity of them is in English (I would say the majority of them), so you can find whatever you need to improve your listening and comprehension skills. Moreover, by doing that you can improve your pronunciation, as well. So…no excuse! This is a real revolution in learning a foreign language in my opinion. Some years ago the only way to listen to mothertongue speakers was going to their country. Now everything can be found in the net. In particular, if you go to sites dedicated to ESL learning you can even choose the topics you prefer and avoid those you find boring. Isn’t this great?

There’s only one thing I don’t fully understand about downloading these files onto my mp3 player: do people walk around the city or go jogging with English listening exercises on their mp3 player? It seems a bit unusual to me. I think I’ll prefer the streaming option.

While searching for podcasts, I found three useful sites for ESL learners. They are quite similar because they all offer material for ESL learners and teachers. I think they’re useful because they’re all good sites and provide a lot of podcasts and other activities. They are:

www.eslpod.com
Here you find more than 300 podcasts on various topics with related explanations. Actors speak quite slowly, so the audio files are not that difficult (even if sometimes it doesn’t seem a natural conversation). There are full oral explanations given by a guide who makes words and expressions clear to the listener. Listening to the guide is like being in a classroom with a mothertongue teacher.

www.listen-to-english.com
This is a blog with many podcasts about interesting and unusual topics. The texts are clearly read and there are also some vocabulary notes or quizzes related to the audio files. Moreover, you can read the transcription of the text. The site is updated every week with a new post (text + podcast).

www.podcastinenglish.com
The site offers many audio files, divided in 3 levels. You can listen or download them and you have related transcriptions, worksheets with answers and vocabulary tasks. Many audio files are interviews and everything sounds spontaneous and natural. People interact a lot and it makes the files interesting to learn communication devices.

...social bookmarking: tag to live, live to tag

Last week we learnt another interesting tool, which can be very useful for our e-learning process. It’s de.licio.us, a website created for social bookmarking. Your question will probably be: what’s social bookmarking? Well, instead of bookmarking your favourite websites and blogs on your own computer at home, you can use this site to post them in a sort of community, where everybody can save the URL of the sites they found interesting while surfing the net. In particular, we used de.licio.us to create a list of many useful links to English e-learning resources. I think it’s a good chance to compare our results and find out interesting websites we can just visit once or we can use more frequently as reference sources to improve our English skills.

I was asked to choose one from each of my classmates’ bookmarks and go visit it. Many of us picked the same websites (the most common were those of BBC or on-line dictionaries) or focused on the same topics (for example, many of us posted feeds concerning listening activities). I read all the notes my peers wrote to introduce their sites carefully. I think we all chose useful sites and blogs and I was really happy when I realized that everybody selected at least one fun study site. I think that the best way to improve a language is to play with it and use it in a relaxed entertaining way. Then, after choosing and visiting one site for each peer, I decided to write down my personal top five, giving you the links and a brief summary. In this way, if you’re interested in one of them (or maybe all of them…who knows?) you can go straight to the source. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

ELISA suggested:
http://www.elllo.org/
This site offers many recorded conversations and interviews about various topics. It is a very useful website for those who need to improve their English listening skills. After listening to each audio file you can test yourself through a related quiz and you find the complete transcription, as well. This can be very useful for self-study, because all the tools you need are provided by the site.

GIOVANNA suggested:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
This website is an on-line writing lab. It suggests you how to write different kinds of texts properly, such as academic papers, professional and technical texts. You find many downloadable PowerPoint files concerning different text-types, and there are also good links to grammar resources.

VALENTINA suggested:
http://web.ku.edu/idea/index.htm
It’s so fascinating to see how the English pronunciation changes from one country to another! In this website you find many recordings of native speakers coming from all over the world, so you can listen to many example of different accents and pronunciations or, as they call them, “English language dialects”. Just click on the continent and then to the country to download the mp3 and the transcription.

EVA suggested:
http://www.readprint.com/
This is an on-line library offering a wide variety of free books ready to be printed. You can look through a long list of authors to find the author you desire. By clicking on the name, you’ll go to an introductory page with biography, notes and a list of downloadable works divided into fiction, non-fiction, poetry and essays.

ALICE suggested:
http://www.acronymfinder.com/
This site is an acronym and abbreviation dictionary. In the introduction they say that it is “the world's largest and most comprehensive dictionary of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms”. I think it’s very useful when you don’t understand their meaning or when you want to check if they are the same in English and your own language (they are often common mistakes!).

...halloween

Halloween takes its origins from a Celtic pre-Christian celebration and does not belong to our own culture. I think that the majority of Italians ignores its real meaning: it’s just a chance to dress up, go party and have fun. Children are more involved because they love dressing up as witches, zombies or vampires and spend the night outside, asking for candies from house to house. But this is not what Halloween really is and represents in Anglo Saxon countries.
Actually, I’m not against Halloween and I’m convinced that we can celebrate it, but we need to know much more about it, in order to become aware of what we are doing. This can help us focus on cultural differences and keep our own tradition alive.

...order, please!

This picture is called “Order please!” and I chose it to introduce this post about tidiness.
During our last lesson in the lab I discovered the existence of a new technological tool: the feed aggregator. Well, since I’m not used to blogging I think it’s quite normal that I had never heard of it before. Nevertheless, I have to say that it is very useful and easy to manage.
Before last Monday I had already bookmarked each blog of my group on my pc: you know, I love traditional approaches, even if I understand that, apart from my blog, I need to update also my technical knowledge. In fact, this tool allows me to see if the blogs I subscribed to have been updated by simply looking to an easy page, where I can find all the new information that has been added. In this way you can save a lot of time! Otherwise you should go to your bookmarks, select each single blog and see if it’s been updated (with the risk of finding every time the same old stuff!) With Bloglines (the program we used) you can also organize all your blogs and sites in different playlists, so everything is more clear and neat. So, if you want to tidy up your virtual mess, check it out to www.bloglines.com!

...two weeks of blogging

First of all I have to admit that I am really hopeless at computers, so I was a little scared when I found out that this course was about blogging, posting comments and using tools that I had never heard before. But after two weeks everything seems to be more clear and easy to me (but don’t even try to ask me how to change the colour of the layout or to centre your picture, please! Hahaa…).
The only problem is that my computer wants to dare me to fight as usual. After I understood more or less how to post my messages, things turned to be more difficult: the ADSL connection started working badly. That’s why I couldn’t be punctual in posting my things. But an angel fell from the sky…well, he wasn’t an angel, really, but a technician from the telephone company who repaired everything without asking me too many questions. Now I think I have what I need to win my computer and go on constantly with my e-tivities.

Joking aside, I enjoyed searching for blogs. I knew what they were, but I was not used to visit and read them. I thought they were just a sort of personal diary where people could write about their own life. But this is not true. Blogs are much more: you can find blogs about every kind of topic that comes to your mind. They can be informative and very professional, even if their language is often informal. I started becoming familiar with the etiquette, but I still like simple concise blogs. If they’re too sophisticated or they contain too many things, they turn to be confusing to me. I loved analysing the different kinds of styles people used, because they can tell you more about the writer, since everybody has its own personal way of writing or organizing things.

I had never considered blogs to be a way to learn and improve my English. After two weeks I can say that this new way of working and writing can be helpful and stimulating for many of us. Moreover, it’s going to be a hard work to keep on writing, reading and commenting blogs every week, especially for people like me, who prefer chatting in front of a cup of coffee, watching people directly in the eyes, instead of staying hours and hours in front of a screen. But I will devote myself to blogging, I promise. But at the end of the lesson, can we sit at a café???

...something about me

Here is the message I wrote to introduce myself to my classmates:

Hi everybody! I’ve chosen this picture because I love singing. Better, singing has become part of my everyday life...that's why I’m always humming tunes: on my way to school, at the supermarket, while doing the housework or cooking and, of course, under the shower, where sometimes I “give my best”! You know, the shower is my favourite stage, but my parents cannot stand my concerts anymore: they keep on telling me to lower my volume or to rush out of that place and hurry up because I’m late! This is what has constantly been happening in my “career” as a bathroom singer. As you can imagine, I had to find a solution. I decided to look for something which could allow me to shout and sing freely, but sound good: so I started taking lessons and singing in a big gospel group and other choirs. Since that moment I’ve become really fond of gospel and black music in general. The only problem is that now I sing and hum more than before…poor parents!

...welcome, bubble readers!

Welcome everybody! I'm Federico and this is the blog I'm going to use during this last year of university to post my E-tivities. I hope you'll enjoy sharing opinions and posts with me.

I called my blog "my thoughts in soap bubbles". You don't know where a soap bubble will go or the people it is going to meet during its way...so I liked this image to describe my messages: they are words inside soap bubbles...flying free. I really cannot know who is going to read them or who is going to write me back. I just know where they start, but their way is out of my control. Let's see what will happen.

Hugs, Fred.