English Virtual Community

I had received a mail from the bab.la and Lexiophiles team telling me that this blog has been nominated for the Top 100 Language Blogs 2010 competition. Please, vote for this blog, if you consider it deserves it by clicking on the logo below. A new window will appear. Scroll it down till you can select English Virtual Community blog. Thank you!!!

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 is the second part of the post written by Karen Schweitzer who kindly offered herself to contribute to this blog. Thank you, Karen for this contribution!!! MIT Open CourseWare - The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offers dozens of free foreign language and literature courses through their OpenCourseWare site. All of the courses are self-paced. Many include audio, video, lecture notes, assignments, reading lists, exams, and other downloadable study materials. Cramberry - Cramberry offers many hi-tech web-based flashcards for English language learners. Users can also create their own flashcards and track online progress. Popling - Popling is a way for language learners to learn without actively studying. This desktop app pops flashcards onto a computer screen at regular intervals so that users can learn new English vocabulary words while completing other computer tasks. Visual ESL - VisualESL.com provides a wide range of interactive video activities for English langu...

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...

http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2008/07/creating-personal-homepage.html

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)