English Virtual Community

Daniel Johansson from the bab.la team has sent me a mail asking to spread the news about a new product called Wording   a very useful tool for those who want to improve their writing. Wording acts as a correct sentence structure checker. It is ideal for English language learners  to improve the use of collocation, diction and syntax in their writing when choosing the appropriate sentence pattern.  For example, by associating correct examples of prepositions with common language usage to give you the best suggestions for the proper preposition.    I would like to remind the reader that bab.la offers students some other tools such as quizzes and games to study/revise the English language.  Link: http://en.bab.la/wording/ 

Susana Giambruni told me that the school where she works, Northfield School, was planning to publish a magazine. She kindly asked me to contribute with an article about IT. I love writing, so I immediately accepted her proposal. My article was titled: "Do not fear IT" and was specially intended for parents and teachers who still despise and keep off digital technology . I tried to convince the reader that technology is not a calamity, but a good excuse to share adults' time, experience and knowledge with our students or children using the tools they are so fond of. I sent my lines to Daniela Barbariol, NFS MAG Coordinator, who told me she would send me two copies of the magazine.    I received the copies last week and I was completely amazed not only at the excellent presentation and quality of the copies ,but also at the very interesting project described in the different sections of the magazine NFS offers to the community .  NFS MAG staff has done a very good jo...

http://www.voki.com is an excellent tool to develop students' imagination and practise the English language.  Advantages:   It is free and embeddable in blogs and wikis Registration is optional Stimulates imagination and creativity Young learners love it ! Disadvantages: Students may spend too much time on the avatar's design Y ou may not record your voice properly Embedding avatars on blogs may be difficult for teachers and students with weak tech - skills Possible Activities: 1- Introduce yourself, say what you did last weekend, say your plans for next holidays, etc.  2- Teacher asks questions about a given topic and Students write the answers in the section "comments" in Blogger . I have used it with young learners and the results were very good. Let me show you some examples:  My avatar http://n4icablaplata.blogspot.com/search/label/voki http://n3-icab.blogspot.com/search/label/voki http://n2-icab.blogspot.com/search/label/...