Saturday, October 16, 2010

Is Twitter right for me?


I am not convinced that Twitter is necessary in my professional collaborative on line learning and sharing experience . I do see why PLN ( Personal Learning Network) is a valuable resource of sharing ideas and opinions but as we all  have preferences about how we learn new things, I think we also can like or dislike how we are going to connect with  other teachers on line. Reading this blog help me to understand why others like it and why they use Twitter every day to learn and to share information. The blog also contains many short videos and power point presentation which explain why PLN is important in teachers' professional development. Thanks to this video "Twitter in Plain English"I obtained  much better understanding of how Twitter works. It also suppose to explain "How a skeptical person fell in love with Twitter"....but I didn't. 

Another great educational post on Twitter Integrating  ICT into the MFL classroom:: Twitter for teachers introduces the popular micro-blogging service Twitter. Moreover, the videos in this post suggest how important it is for teacher from all over the world to stay connected with each other to learn from one another. And again, I do agree....but I'm not comfortable using Twitter. Maybe those couple days that I had to explore Twitter is not enough to see its greatness. Maybe I'm just overwhelmed with the amount of the information flowing and fallowing and being tweeted.  The time will tell.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Potato from patata


     Had enough anglicisms? | Macmillan discusses the influence of Spanish and English language on each other.  The author, Joseph Persico,  explains how the flow of the words in both directions effects both languages and supports his idea with very interesting facts. For example,  "according to the Oxford Dictionary 1,650 words have entered English directly from the Spanish" ( like: potato, avocado, tequila, hurricane, chili,chocolate.....)
     For those who are the language teachers it is very important to know where the words are coming from because it might be helpful  while explaining many of students' concerns. For example, the pronunciation of the word "ghost" and silent "h" can be explained by tracking where this word came from.