English Virtual Community

Computers are constantly changing. We can find a wide variety of sizes, colours and utilities in the market. After the success of the ultra-portable netbooks the nettops arrive! What are "nettops"? They are desktop PCs with small cabinets, modest performance and low costs, that seek to revitalize the segment of desk equipments. The idea is to offer it to those who are neither gamers nor video editors or people who need to do any other task which require a powerful processor. The tiny cabinets directly integrated to the monitor are the attraction, besides they are ultra-silent spend less electricity and require less cooling. Are you thinking in getting one? They are already available here in La Plata, Argentina. Local shops are offering MSI nettops for about u$s700.-

Last Saturday June 27th I attended a seminar about How to Assess Young Learners carried out by Prof. Analía Caldiz (MA Discourse Analysis, ICAB staff member) at Instituto Terrero. On this ocassion I had the opportunity to meet the representatives of three important publishers: Ticiana Neder (Longman), Carolina Coppa (Oxford), Mabel Manzano and Fabián García ( Richmond). I asked these representatives for online interactive material. Longman offers a four module course called Teacher Development Interactive which provides professional development and an internationally recognised certification from Hunter College, City University of New York. Jeremy Harmer is one of the facilitators ; an internationally hosted online learning and assessment system for English courses designed to go hand in hand with Longman’s texbook series; iTests , and dictionary widgets which you can add to your blog. Among Richmond Publishing brochures, I got the one belonging to the “New Framework” book s...

The Top 100 Language Blogs 2009 is the largest language blog competition and is hosted annually by bab.la and Lexiophiles. It is aimed at finding the best blogs related to languages and awarding language-loving bloggers. This year there were 473 nominated blogs from 26 different countries in four categories. I am very happy to announce that this blog has been nominated for the "Top 100 Language Blogs 2009" competition!!! Due to the amount of blogs they have created categories. (Language Learning/Language Teaching/Language Technology/ Language Professionals) English Virtual Community blog is in category Language Technology . Voting will start on July 8 and close on July 27 . Winners will be announced on July 30. Thank you very much for this nomination! It means I am doing things well. Thanks to all who have inspired me these years and who follow this blog :-)