Monthly Archives: November 2010

Fur.ly: URL Shortening

freeware, Resources,
Now that I’m working in a high school this little tool Fur.ly I’m going to show you is more necessary than ever.
I still like to take my students, from time to time ,to the Computers Room to do some interactive exercises or to see a video but especially with the younger ones some kind of guidance is necessary so they don’t end up visiting sites you have absolutely no intention of them visiting.
What this little tool does is to replace different url into one , so when you take your students to the lab they have no excuse to get lost in the web of webs. It’s a free service and requires no registration. You copy and paste all the links you want to share one by one and then click on “GO” , and what you get is one single url .
 

 

 

 

and this is what you get

 

Now, the image above shows what Fur.ly looks like. At the top you can see a small bar displaying how many sites you can visit , there are also navigating arrows and a drop down menu.

I’m sure that if you’re not a teacher and you’re reading this you can still find lots of possibilities to use Fur.ly when sharing sites with your friends

Word of the day: Tense and a Joke to Make you and me Smile

Word of the Day

An English teacher spent a lot of time marking grammatical errors on her students’ papers and was beginning to doubt whether she was getting through to them. One day as the stress got to her, she leaned over her desk and rubbed her temples.”What’s the matter, Mrs. D?” a passing student asked.

“Tense,” she mumbled.

The student hesitated a moment, then said, “What could be the matter? What has been the matter? What was the matter?”

Tense (adj) = feeling worried, uncomfortable, and unable to relax

Tense (noun) =any of the forms of a verb that show the time, continuance, or completion of an action or state that is expressed by the verb. ‘I am’ is in the present tense, ‘I was’ is past tense, and ‘I will be’ is future tense

Linguee: the web as a dictionary

Dictionaries, Writing skill, , ,

We all know how difficult it is to write, even more in a foreign language. More often than not we look up words in dictionaries only to find that it offers so many possibilities for the translation of the word that  we don’t know which one to choose for the context we need. In fact, sometimes it doesn’t help us at all but makes things more complicated as we don’t know which word to use to mean what we want to express and we end up completely frustrated. Here, Linguee can help us as it is a bilingual dictionary but  in context.
Let’s see how it works. Click on the word Linguee and it’ll take you straight to the dictionary. Try the Spanish idiom      ” darlo por hecho” … see? Helpful , isn’t it?

Now, let’s try a single word such as “terminar” .

Now it works as a dictionary with an expandable list of the words in context and   the added possibility of listening to some of the translations.

Give it a try, I’m sure it’ll help you a lot improve your writing skills!

Lesson Plan : Fawlty Towers

Lesson Plan: Elementary, Listening, ,

I’m sure, dear reader, that you already know that I’ve got a temporary new job and when I say temporary I really mean it and it’s not that I’m not happy teaching teenagers (some of them are great to teach), it’s that SOME teenagers spoil all the fun. On second thoughts, I think I probably shouldn’t have written about my feelings so early in the course because I might end up feeling completely fulfilled teaching people who don’t want to learn  and you already know how the saying goes” People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” ( in Spanish… no se puede escupir para arriba… in case you haven’t guessed. Anyway, I’ve never been politically correct.

So, this change of career has brought about some other changes in my life and though I can hardly call myself a couch potato, the truth is that I watch more TV now than I used to. Even though, I cannot bring myself to swallow just anything on TV (and I’m sure you all know the kind of programmes I’m talking about) there are some sitcoms I enjoy.

Some time ago I told you about one of my favourites, The IT Crowd(post here and listening exercise here) and today I want to tell you about Fawlty Towers, probably the best-known ,most-loved, funniest British sitcoms ever produced in Great Britain (BBC 70’s) . The setting is a fictional hotel named Fawlty Towers and the main characters are the irascible Basil Fawlty, owner of the hotel, his domineering wife Sybil and Manuel and the funny Spanish waiter form Barcelona.
With only 12 episodes produced, Fawlty Towers has become a classic and though every episode is worth watching,  Communication Problems is probably one of my favourites.

I have chosen this 1 minute video for my elementary students to practise

I’m …… (English). I speak …… (English)
How are you? I’m fine , thank you

Now, if you want to do a listening comprehension about this video , click here

Can you spot the error?

The English language, ,

Have a look at this photo and read what the notice says with attention . Can you spot the error?

Well, have you? According to the information the kindergarten is really exclusive.

Remember the difference between : the kids’ studio and the kid’s studio . In the first case, the studio is for kids in the plural  whereas in the second case it’s just for one kid. I can’t see why anybody would want to send their children to a kindergaten where the kid will have to play with the teacher .