Hi, everybody!
Last Wednesday I couldn’t attend our weekly lesson in the lab, so I read the instructions for the e-tivity 5 from home. When I read that our next e-tivity would have involved another Web technology, I smiled. Do you remember the very final lines in my post about feed aggregators? I wrote: “How many unknown worlds will I discover from now on?”. Only a week have passed since then and…what a surprise! Here we have another new technology! Great, isn’t it? Yes, it is this time! I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m so optimistic, when I was scared of any new technology just a week ago. Well, you know, I feel more confident now; I understood that I need to learn a lot before sleeping soundly in my bed. There’re so many interesting things in this wide and unknown world of Web 2.0! From now on, I want to have a positive attitude towards Web 2.0 because it isn’t so hard in the end and it can even be entertaining! So…I’ll pull my socks up!
Now, let’s talk about social bookmarking. It’s pointless saying that I never heard about this word before Wednesday (I know, I still lived in the Stone Age!). I usually stored my favourite websites on my computer and used them for my purposes; I had no idea there could be a way to share them with others. It was a del.icio.us surprise discovering that a way to share websites existed! Because this is the main aim of this technology: let you store and share your favourite websites with other people simply using the Web. The person who invented it was a wizard! But sharing isn’t the only advantage of this technology: it can even be a way to help you in “filtering the overload of information on the Internet”, as Sarah said. When you search for a website you can see how many people have already saved it. Of course, the more people saved it the more useful that website is; in this way, you don’t need to spend hours and hours navigating in vain.
I spent a lot of time navigating in del.icio.us, searching for useful websites for our language learning. I found very interesting and useful websites, above all regarding English learning. What impressed me at most were the websites about English pronunciation, such as for example the one by the University of Iowa and the Free Online Pronunciation Guide. They’re extremely useful and easy to use. Nowadays, you only need a computer and an Internet connection and you’ve got almost the entire world in your room! When I had a look at the websites my peers found, I realized how useful this technology can be: they stored websites which I didn’t found in spite of my three hours long navigating! So, I can use them without problems and -above all- without spending more time searching for them. For example, both Giovanna and Sara stores a websites called Common errors in English; it provides a thorough list of the errors native and non-native speakers can do. They deal with vocabulary, verb tenses, prepositions and much more. For each error you find a simple and clear explanation. It's definitely useful, isn't it? Marta found a great website as well: it's an Internet Slang Dictionary. There you can find the most used slang words in alphabetical order. since I should improve my colloquial English, I'll use it for sure! Elena stored a very interesting website, which hopefully can help me in improving my listening skills. It's called Randall's ELS Cyber Listening Lab: there are a lot of listenings and related exercises which help you in the comprehension. The site even provides the correct answers to the quiz and their explications.
Now I don't have any excuses: with all this tools, I must improve my English!
SUT! (i.e. "see you tomorrow"- thanks, Marta!;-) )
Martina
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