Try del.icio.us- you’ll love it! I still think of the time when I was looking for studies that really work, authentic articles, and effective information but rather than finding them straightaway, I was obliged to search for them for hours and hours. After spending so many energies searching on the web, the result was pretty unsatisfactory. But now, that time is over because now I can count on del.icio.us!
Del.icio.us is a useful way of 'filtering' the overload of information on the Internet and a very effective way of using Internet for my learning and searches. This week Sarah introduced the class into the world of SOCIAL BOOKMARKING. As she said, social bookmarking is not only a way to store and save your favourite website online, but also a way to share them with people you know or with people who have your same interests. Google can help you to find a huge amount of information but it doesn’t suggest you which site is good for you and why it is useful.
By using social bookmarking, you can highlight what is special about a site and why it’s worthwhile to have a look at it! In addition, if you create a personal network of people who share your interests it’ll be very easy to find out some new interesting sites, just by clicking on the sites they added. To search for websites and blogs that might interest you will become as easy as it has never been before!
As a matter of fact, websites are an immensely popular cultural form of communication and they don’t have to be read from the beginning to the end because you can find interesting only some chunks of them. Despite their popularity and accessibility, they are not organized in a hierarchic way. All that said, it’s difficult to estimate the degree of effectiveness of each site; it’s not easy to guess from the title or from the url how much meaningful a certain site is for you. Del.icio.us is the solution! It's simple, it's easy! The easy-to-read format of delicious does not mean that it is not carefully crafted. In this site you can find everything about a website: its title, its url, its brief description, some notes and tags. In addition, you can also retrieve the name of the people who added it into del.icio.us.
In my group, many peers chose educational websites. This is partly due to the contents we always are looking for: English learning, dictionaries, grammar, vocabulary, punctuation and so on. I had a look at some websites and I will briefly describe what I liked most.
- Camilla’s choice: informal English dictionary
“This is a simple and useful dictionary of informal English”. (Camilla) - Elena’s choice: English Pronunciation
“An useful site to practice English phonetics and improve your pronunciation. You can work on the most difficult English sounds through videos and dictations, by comparing minimal pairs, listening and recording conversations, or by trying your hand at tong”. (Elena) - Marina’s choice: schematic rules for English punctuation
“A helpful list of the different parts of punctuation when writing in English”. (Marina) - Silvia’s choice: wordreference
“This website contains free online dictionaries. It can be very useful when you're translating! As a matter of fact, it contains both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.” (Silvia) - Veronica’s choice: Free online English dictionary
“This free online English dictionary can be a useful tool when translating a text into English. This monolingual dictionary not only explains the meaning and the grammatical function of the word you are interested in, but also its ethymology.” (Veronica)
Overall, I think the websites my peers chose aim to promote specialist English learning in the field of on-line learning. They focus on specific aspects of language use in one or several languages and provide valuable insights into language and communication research. As we pointed out in class, punctuation is a very complex subject for Italian students who learn English and we still make too many mistakes. Marina wisely put on del.icio.us a website where we can find schematic rules in order to correctly use English punctuation. Elena suggested us a very good site which can help us to improve our pronunciation. Camilla, Veronica and Silvia are interested in dictionaries: on the one hand, Camilla wants to know more on informal English; on the other hand, Silvia and Veronica looks for a good online resource for translation’s aims. In my opinion, the basic features of online dictionaries should be: to help me to understand the differences in meaning between words with similar meanings; to provide detailed definitions and natural examples; to suggest the correct use of a word; to give some example sentences which are taken from authentic spoken English.
In conclusion, I really liked the work my peers done. By exploiting the websites they suggested me, I hope I’ll gain confidence in using new vocabulary!
Thank you girls for your contributions on del.icio.us!
Social bookmarking is a very useful resource and I hope we’ll take advantage of it!
No comments:
Post a Comment