This Wiki no skype!

Last Wednesday no skype xchange…what a pity!
Our lucky American friends had their spring break! This should mean that spring has finally come…Or at least overseas!! Here the weather is making fun of us! :-(

Two days of warmth and spring and now everything’s grey and quite cold again!
The activity we have to do on the wiki is quite complicated, I still haven’t understood very well what am I supposed to do. Sarah divided us into groups and each group has to do some activities. As I can’t come to Mondays lessons, Sarah created a group for non current students and so Stefania, Elisa and me are supposed to discuss on the wiki page and do all the work as the others. The problem is that communicating on the wiki is not that easy! Maybe we all have to understand how it works exactly! Till now we had not the chance to actually have a discussion on he wiki!! I really don’t know how to communicate with the other peers of my group! We do need some time to settle in I guess!
So, I hope that we’ll soon solve this problem in order to do all the work the best we can do! I know that missing Monday’s lessons is a shame, because discussions in class are very useful, but my work really doesn’t allows me to come to Padova in order to attend the lesson.
See you on Wednesday!

First date!

Here I am again after a long and not relaxing break!
Not relaxing because of the exams I had, or better we all had to do! Anyway now I’m back and ready for this brand new adventure!
I was really exited about starting this second semester and particularly the exchange with foreign students. I decided to choose the exchange with the American colleagues of Dickinson University because I wanted to use Skype!! Skype it is not a new tool for me, I usually use it at home to speak with my foreign friends or to keep in contact with some Italian friends who live far away. The point is that it is a very useful and funny device which allows you to speak with who you wants and the geographical distance doesn’t matter!
I have to admit that, last Wednesday, at the beginning of the conversation I felt a little bit embarrassed but than after just few minutes we broke the ice and all my “fear” vanished.
Alice, Corina and me started talking quite easily and luckily our American peer speaks in a very comprehensible way! After the presentations we spoke about our University and I was very curious about college, so I had to ask to Corina if everything works like in the films, I mean the parties, confraternities and so on…You know what?! Corina confirmed my “stereotypes” about life in the college! It seems so funny, and everything’s so different from here! At least from my commuter’s experience…
Talking about subjects and courses we discovered many others differences between our two school system, the fact is that they seems to be very free to chose which course to attend not only at University but also at school!
So, after this 1 hour of conversation I can say that I’m very happy about this exchange!! It’s a pity (obviously only for us) that Americans are going to have their spring break this week, because we’ll miss the chance to connect to Skype and speak. Anyway 7 days are not too much!
See you soon!

My Personal Learning Environment!

The PLE is our Personal Learning Environment…Great! I mean, I never thought about it, but that’s right! We all have our “channels” through which we learn and improve a foreign language! Day by day we construct a net around us that helps us learning!
Usually I don’t make mind maps to study so at the beginning I thought: “What do I have to do?!?!” But then, after just a while of doubt I started the activity step by step, as Sarah said and…Voila! Done it! I mean it has not been hard! I just had to put down what I do!
I tried to construct my map with FreeMind…but still my relationship with technologies is not that good! So I took the dear old “paper and pencil” and started working on my PLE map!
I decided to divide my personal learning environment into 5 big categories which are “Formal learning”, “For fun”, “Digit@l” “Friends” and "Around me”.
First of all, we have to make a distinction between the formal and the informal learning: "formal learning" deals with school, University and all the “classic” tools like grammar books, dictionaries, homework and activities that we, as students, have to do. I think that this point, is the most prescriptive one, and probably also the less funny…Is it learning grammar rules and their dammed exceptions funny?! NO! At all!! But at the same time it is the most important point of all the map, is the starting point of everything because without an academic course that gives us the basis to learn a language, all the other aspects would not exist! Well, maybe that’s not completely true…many people do learn a language without studying grammars and things like that…But that’s another story!! This has to be my personal learning environment, and this is how it works for me!
So, having cleared up, what the formal learning is, I can now explain you the other 4 point, which all belongs to informal learning!
Under the etiquette “for fun” I put things that I usually do in my spare time like listening to music, watching television or reading. I have to confess you that I have to know the words of the songs I like, it’s stronger then me! I always check the lyrics on the net and in this way I learn a lot of new words and expressions! All those activities are like hobbies, they are not heavy nor boring and they are surely useful to learn a L2!
Another category I put is “digit@l”, actually many of the tools I indicated could be also part of the “formal learning” as we discovered them attending Sarah course at University…But to tell the truth they are so informal!!! I mean, many teachers still work in class with old books and photocopies…Anyway, here I put all the technological tools that I use to find information, to search for what I am interested in and to save and organize my favourites.
The forth category is called “friends” and to me, this is the best one! Leaving philosophical considerations about friendship, I can say that speaking with my foreign friends is the best way to improve my language! I have a lot of Spanish friends, and some English too, unluckily many of them are far away, but thanks to technologies I can always speak or chat with them! And if I’m lucky I can have also conversations face to face!
The last category is named “around me” and contains all those input that come from outside and reach us without my will like fashion, advertisement, the labels of food and products in general. These are all things that surround us and we do implicitly learn things from them!
So, learning a language is a lifelong process, and the channels are several; the most important thing that never has to fail is the personal will! Learning an L2 is not like learning how to ride a bike…Learning a language implies exercise, dedication, study and enthusiasm! We all have to find our incitements and it doesn’t matter if they are formal or informal input! The point is reaching a goal, and my goal is learning English!

A compass, please!!

As it has already been said many times during this course we are living in a digital era! Mass media and Internet with their tools seem to make information easily available for all the people, but is it completely true?
When navigating on the net we are assailed by an enormous amount of information and it’s not easy to orientate ourselves! We definitely need a compass to find our way about in this mass!
If we search for something in the net, we’ll see a lot of info matching the topic of our research…But is it everything valid and reliable?
The answer is no!!!
We surely have to think critically about the returns!
As far as I’m concerned, I always try not to waste my time consulting untrustworthy websites and sources…But how do I judge them?! I have to confess that many times I follow my inspiration saying “Ok, this seems to be a useful web site!!” I guess that following my sixth sense it’s not always a good thing and that’s why many times I lose the sense of direction!
During this course Sarah suggested us many tools and strategies to face this problem: Bloglines is one of these, as well as Google advanced research or Del.icio.us.
In the three websites we had to consult for e-tivity 8 there are some interesting criteria for judging the sites, their authority and validity!
First of all we have to know clearly what we want to search otherwise…what are we going to search!?! Opinions, facts, news reports, history!?
Secondly, when on the screen appears the list with the returns we have to look at the URL of the different sites before follow up a link! As a matter of fact, URL can say something about the seriousness of a web site: e.g. if it ends with “edu” it means that the responsible for the information is an educational institution.
Once we have decided which links we want to follow up, we have to check who the responsible for the site or the author is and if the site is regularly updated.
So, to draw a conclusion, we can say that evaluating is something that we need all the time: not only for academic purposes or for our theses but daily in our lives!! The temptation to accept what ever we find is real, but we have to pay attention because everyone can be a potential publisher of Web documents, all we need is an Internet account!
So we have to be critic and clear-headed in order to find what we need!

I love this song...don't u?!?!

I Tube, You Tube...

You Tube is a video sharing website where any user can watch videos for free!! If you get register you can upload your videos, create an account with your favourite videos and make play lists too.
I love you tube!! It is very funny! You can watch any kind of video, u just have to write some key words (tags) and then press the search button and…Done! A list of video will appear! On the left side of the page there are some stars indicating the quality of the video so u won’t waste time watching bad videos. There are also important information like 4 example the duration of the video, or how many time it has been watched and in this way we are able to make a quick selection of what to see.
There are a lot of funny and stupid videos, about animals, children, cars, sports and whatever available on the net! I could spend hours watching other people’ videos!
But there is something more! It can undoubtedly be an educational tool: You Tube allows us to get in contact with real english speakers!! Well, not only english of course!! You can find videos in any language!! The point is that watching part of TV programs, interviews, jokes, sketches and comedies we face real speakers’ language! There are real conversations…But u know what!? You can click the “pause button” any time you need!! That’s great! You can watch the video all the times that u want or need in order to understand what’s going on!

A podcast is an audio file that you can download for free onto your pc or mp3 player.
Nowadays podcasting is really widespread around the world and on the net you can find a lot of podcast about all the different topics that you want.
I mean, this is great!! I don’t know if you like Radio Deejay, but I do! On Radio Deejay website you can download podcasts of the different programs…U have to try “Deejay chiama Italia”!!! Linus and Nicola are great!! Just an advice: if you walk around listening to them on your I-pod you’r surely going to laugh a lot….Other people may think that you’r mad! Hahaha J
Well, obviously podcasts can be useful also for educational purposes, I think that they have replaced the old cassettes of the language lab we grown up with!
Thanks to this technology the audio files available have increased incredibly and so we have got a lot of chances to improve our listening skills.
Searching for podcasts in Google I found some interesting things:

1) http://www.voanews.com/english/podcasts.cfm
This is a web site where you can find many different podcasts; you can choose a region like Africa, USA, Europe and so on, to see the news about those areas, or you can choose a topic like for example arts and entertainment, environment, education, sports an so on. I mean, many different kind of information available to be downloaded!! And moreover you can also see the scripts of the audio files!!! I think it can be very helpful to check whether you have understand it well or not!

2) http://www.englishthroughstories.com/scripts/scripts.html
Also in here you can find podcasts , but this time there are short stories divided into episodes. At the beginning of each audio file, a voice tells us who is going to read the story and sums up what happened in the previous episode. It is also possible to see the transcription of what the voice is reading and, as I have already said, this is very useful: you can see what u have actually understood and it is a good tool to make auto corrections.

3) http://www.manythings.org/jokes/
Here there are jokes for ESL students…To tell the truth I thought it to be funny…But the jokes are terrible!![John says I’m pretty, Andy says I’m ugly, what do u think Peter? I think u’r pretty ugly!L ] Is it a matter of cultural differences!? I guess so… Anyway it can be interesting to listen to them. A part from jokes there are also short stories, exercises of “listen and read along” and “listen and repeat” to improve our pronunciation.