English Virtual Community

Blogging from Evelyn Izquierdo

Learning a new language can be a fun and exciting experience, especially for younger children. The key is to keep them interested in what they are learning. Fortunately, the Internet provides many free games, flashcards, songs, books, and other resources that can entertain, engage, and educate young English language learners. Here are 15 resources worth exploring: ESL-Kids.com provides worksheets, flashcards, games, and songs that children can use to learn English. The site also features an In Class section that demonstrates how to use these resources.  Starfall  With this fun interactive English game site, beginning students can practice their ABCs and reading. Starfall is primarily for first grade children but works well for pre-K to second graders.  BarryFunEnglish is an elementary student English learning site. Through this site, you will find worksheets, games, vocabulary builders, flashcards, listening and PowerPoint presentations. The PowerPoint presentations...

If you are looking for an online publisher, try http://issuu.com/ where you can explore a world of publications by people and publishers alike. You can also collect, share and publish in a format designed to make your documents look their very best. Issuu is a popular destination for quality publications on the web. We can give your readers the possibility of reading your previews or entire archives. Read more in an article written by me at Lost in Technology

This weekEdublogs has got some goodies for you - a student blogging challenge and the chance to win one of 16 free Edublogs Supporter accounts!!!! And one for the teachers... About the Student Blogging Challenge Edublogs's last blogging challenge had over 1000 students, from 15 countries, aged 6 to 18 years old, writing posts, commenting and getting to know about each others cultures while improving their blogging skills and connecting to a global audience.The growth of the students’ blogging skills during each challenge is totally amazing and inspiring; check out these examples of student work. Challenge Categories This time the Challenge Categories have been expanded into two separate categories; both designed to improved student skills.Students (or classes) can choose to participate in either or both: Better Bloggers Challenge – emphasis on better blogging, improving your blog design and connecting to a global audience Better Commenter Challenge – focusing how you write comment...

This post was written by Karen Schweitzer who kindly offered herself to contribute to this blog. Karen Schweitzer, Business School Guide for About.com, writes about online colleges for OnlineColleges.net. Thank you, Karen for this contribution!!! "Incorporating hi-tech learning aids and applications into a study regimen can sometimes make it easier for language learners to learn and retain new information. You can order many of these products for a cost from catalogs or from companies who provide such services. You can also find free options online . Most of the free options work just as well as the paid options and can be used indefinitely without incurring any costs. This list provides information about 5 free online tools that can be used for language learning. ( I will be including more online tools suggested by Karen in future posts, don´t miss them ) : 1- FreeRice - Language learners can give free rice to hungry people by playing this English vocabulary game from the UN F...

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 :-)

I was in Córdoba city (Argentina) on May 27th, 28th and 29th because the local university organized a 3-day-Congress on ICT applied to Language Learning. Teachers from different parts of the country attended the event. The papers were about different topics: use of blogs and forums, webquests, Collaborative Learning, Moodle platform, distance learning, moodle platforms. I found particularly interesting 6-hour-workshop about "How to introduce teachers to the use of ICT in their classrooms" given by Mgtr. Víctor Sajoza Juric who gave us some useful guidance about this issue. Now let me tell you about my experience in the city. I had the fortune to be in Córdoba on "El Cordobazo" (See more info in Wikipedia ) anniversary. The city seemed to vibrate at the rhytm of the drums played by the workers who marched along streets carrying Argentinian flags in the memory of their lost co-workers who died or suffered persecussion during the military dictatorship. Some teachers an...

Yesterday I attended an event called "Mundo Bloggers" (Blogger World) It took place in Buenos Aires and most of the participants were local people. I would like to point out the following: 1) 50% of participants were above their 40s - me among them :-) 2) Although most of the speakers were interesting, I found Santiago Bilinkis' power point presentation the most interesting and Alejandro Oxenford's speech the most enriching. 3) The most successful Argentinian bloggers are two ladies - good for women! - in their early 20s (19 and 25 respectively). If you want to read about them. Their virtual names are: Cumbio (fotolog teen age social leader who was interviewed by the New York Times!) and Conz 4) A 13-old-year boy broadcasted the event alive using http://www.ustream.tv/ Now my question is : According to points 3 and 4 mentioned above, shall we go on teaching with a common blackboard and chalk or maker ????

We had a chat on RSS and Bloglines today. Unfortunatelly, I did not record it. So, I will try to summarize what we said. What is RSS? It is an acronym that stand for Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Sindication. An RSS "feed" is a type of electronic file written in the XML formatting language (similar to HMTL, but with user-defined parameters), which contains information about content on a website or weblog. Weblogs and news sites are the most common use of RSS feeds. When new content is added to a blog or website, that contect is automatically updated to every subscriber of that RSS feed. Advantages? 1-Most aggresgator programs are free and can be easily obtained on the Internet. Example: Bloglines , Google Reader , Mozilla Thunderbird 2-RSS is one of the most timely and cost-effective forms of professional development. 3- It is time saving. You can track more information in a short period of time. 4- If you are subscribed to different parts of the news world , you will be...

How can you find others using the same tags you've placed in your posts? Well, open an account in Technorati What is Technorati? It is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google, Yahoo and IceRocket. (More Info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technorati ) Go to Tecnorati at http://www.technorati.com/ Open an account Go to "My Account" Click on the "Blogs" tab Go to "Claim a Blog" and write your blog url You'll see "Begin Claim" and will get a choice for next step, just pick the simpler, "Post Claim". Activate the claim using "post claim". Follow Instructions. Once you have successfully claimed your blog, complete the Edit Blog Settings form, where you'll need to write the tags that will describe yours, and HERE, include wrtingmatrix. When done, you'll see "My Claimed Blogs". Click on "Ping". You can now check for your blog's new content. There's no need to ...

Last Saturday we had our first chat session of Writing Matrix Reloaded. Writing Matrix Reloaded group is pretty different from the one we had last year. Matías, Barbara, Joao and María Luján are still with us - LUCKILY- , the new participants are all teachers: Beyza from Turkey , Berta from Venezuela, José Da Silva from Brazil and Liliana from Argentina . The chat lasted and hour and it was about tags and tagging , their use and purpose. Some teachers found it interesting and clarifying. Writing Matrix Tagging in Youtube by Vance at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHjlCY0BCNo

“Writingmatrix” es un proyecto originado por Vance Stevens quien convoca a docentes y a sus respectivos alumnos a utilizar blogs. Dichos blogs no tienen como fin realizar tareas de clase, sino escribir sobre el o los temas que realmente les interesara, y utilizar estos blogs como diarios en línea. Para hacer más interesante esta experiencia, Stevens convoca a participantes de distintas culturas. Poco a poco se fue armando un equipo de seis facilitadores de distintos países: Vance Stevens de Abu Dabi, Doris Molero de Venezuela, Sasha Sirk de Eslovenia, Rita Zeinstejer y, yo, Nelba Quintana de Argentina. Todos somos profesores de inglés familiarizados con las TICs. Con el fin de reunir participantes, envié una invitación a los miembros de la Comunidad Virtual de Inglés - EVC la cual modero desde 2001. A esta invitación respondieron personas de distintas edades, ocupaciones y niveles de inglés – oscila entre el pre- intermedio y el intermedio- pero con un mismo interés explorar la We...

I am very pleased to announce a new Blog Day in Argentina! This time it will take place in the beautiful city of Rosario. The organizers are really hard working and I think it will be a very very interesting experience. More info Writing Matrix is present in its wiki at: http://nodorosarino.pbwiki.com/ http://nodorosarino.pbwiki.com/English+Virtual+Community+Blog (in Spanish)

Blogs or Weblogs are the fastest growing technology on the Internet. With there being so many blogs now, how can you make our blog known and get people to read it? How can our blog become outstanding if there are so many people who are trying to accomplish the same thing? Avoiding the use of scrolls and links in the text body, and eliciting reader response are some of the keys for being successful on the Internet. New textual mechanisms are taking over to render the act of reading easier and more intuitive because we get tired soon from reading on a screen. Consequently, our blog writing style must be different from the usual writing style we use on a sheet of paper. Blog writing must make the act of reading easier and more intuitive. ( to be continued)