Group items tagged

LANGUAGES AND LEARNING - THE PATH I HAVE FOLLOWED "with my "Languages and Learning" blog at http://amandasalt.blogspot.com I also joined Twitter, although I found it a lonely and pointless activity initially. I now find it to be one of my main sources of CPD (Continuing Professional Development) and also a place where people are generous with their praise and genuine in their concern. A visit to the Isle of Wight for a languages and ICT conference, organised by the amazing Joe Dale (www.joedale.typepad.com), added to my enthusiasm, and as I approach the end of this academic year, I have created a wiki for my pupils (http://spanishingrosvenor.wikispaces.com) and also dabbled with Audacity, Goanimate, Voki, ToonDoo, Animoto and Voice Thread, amongst others.Today I ran workshops on all of these as well as an overview of blogging, Twitter and Diigo."

LANGUAGES AND LEARNING - THE PATH I HAVE FOLLOWED with my "Languages and Learning" blog at http://amandasalt.blogspot.com I also joined Twitter, although I found it a lonely and pointless activity initially. I now find it to be one of my main sources of CPD (Continuing Professional Development) and also a place where people are generous with their praise and genuine in their concern. A visit to the Isle of Wight for a languages and ICT conference, organised by the amazing Joe Dale (www.joedale.typepad.com), added to my enthusiasm, and as I approach the end of this academic year, I have created a wiki for my pupils (http://spanishingrosvenor.wikispaces.com) and also dabbled with Audacity, Goanimate, Voki, ToonDoo, Animoto and Voice Thread, amongst others.Today I ran workshops on all of these as well as an overview of blogging, Twitter and Diigo.

# Difficulty : Rating 1 (easiest) to 5 (hardest) of the difficulty of learning the language for an English speaker. Many additional factors will affect the difficulty you will experience when trying to learn a given language, especially the other languages you already speak. Such a rating system has obvious limitations but I take great care in assessing the difficulty of each language. Many of these ratings have been discussed on the language forum (see for example the discussion about Korean). People always complain that the rating given to their native language is 'too low' - I wonder how they would now since they never had to learn it as a foreign language. If you can make a case for a different difficulty rating for a specific language you are welcome to bring this up in the language forum. # Popularity : Subjective rating of how popular the language is with Western learners. This obviously varies a great deal from country to country, but is a good overall indicator of the availability of learning material for the language. I visit many physical language bookshops as well as some online ones and think I have a rather objective basis for establishing 'popularity' of a language with foreign language learners in the number of courses and books available for each language. # GDP : Nominal GDP of the countries where the languages is spoken. This gives an indication of the economic importance of the language on the international scene. We have not used PPP GDP as it emphasizes non-tradable goods. When a country uses several languages we used the percentage of speakers of the language multiplied by the country's GDP. If you feel that economic factors are meaningless in language learning, please disregard this column. # Countries : Number of countries where the language is an official language or where there are important communities who speak this language at home. This gives you an indication of the spread of the language across the globe. Some languages (English, Spa

Fast cross-referenced definitions, spelling correction, and word searches from WordNet, Webster's, FOLDOC, and a variety of specialized sources. Tips:Typing word.dict.die.net into your browser's location bar will show you a definition for word.You can also use wildcards to find a word. ? will match any single character, while * will match zero or more. For example, if you know the word you are looking for starts with h, contains ist, and ends with c, you can ask for: h*ist*cFor quick dictionary lookups as you browse web pages, bookmark "Dictionary" either by right-clicking on the link and selecting "Add bookmark for link" or dragging it to your browser toolbar. You may then highlight any word on a page and select the Dictionary bookmark to see a definition.

Have you noticed that some of the most "POPULAR" language programs and methods are suddenly getting on board the 21st century train and offering live online learning? Learning a language online in the comfort of your own home with the assistance of a teacher is a truly genius concept. The only problem is, developing a curriculum, finding great teachers and integrating a fully functional eLearning program with progressive technological tools doesn't happen overnight.

When you hire a professional translation firm, you want to build a long-term relationship that will ensure accuracy, consistency and timely translations. I have compiled a list of tips for assessing the skills of a translation company.

"The 'Web 2.0' age has brought us more than a bunch of social networking apps and free web tools, it has also brought about a fundamental shift in the way many web based companies do business. I started to wonder if that change could be mirrored in the physical market place by moving towards a new approach to the language school and the way technology is used in it and how it fits into the face to face business model."

The 'Web 2.0' age has brought us more than a bunch of social networking apps and free web tools, it has also brought about a fundamental shift in the way many web based companies do business. I started to wonder if that change could be mirrored in the physical market place by moving towards a new approach to the language school and the way technology is used in it and how it fits into the face to face business model.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics is a public voice of mathematics education, providing vision, leadership, and professional development to support teachers in ensuring mathematics learning of the highest quality for all students. With 100,000 members and 250 affiliates, NCTM is the world's largest organization dedicated to improving math education in preK‑12. The Greek mathematician Archimedes approximated pi by inscribing and circumscribing polygons about a circle and calculating their perimeters. Similarly, the value of pi can be approximated by calculating the areas of inscribed and circumscribed polygons. This activity allows for the investigation and comparison of both methods. Instructions:   In this applet, polygons are inscribed and circumscribed around circles. The area of the polygons around a circle of radius 1 are calculated on the left, and the perimeter of the polygons around a circle of diameter 1 are calculated on the right. Change the value of n to increase or decrease the number of sides in the polygons, and notice how the calculations of the areas and perimeters begin to approximate pi.

"Text2Phonetics is a very handy site if you like to use phonemic script with your students. It can take a lot of the hard work out of transcribing text to phonetic symbols. You just paste in a short piece of text, click a button, and it does it for you."

* An example sentence-even if we've only found one sentence for a word, we'll show it to you. (And we'll show you where the sentence came from, too! * Related words: not just synonyms and antonyms, but words that are used in the same contexts. (For instance, cheeseburger, milkshake, and doughnut are not synonyms, but they show up in the same kinds of sentences.) * Images tagged by our friends at Flickr: want to know what a "pout" looks like? We'll show you. * Statistics: how rare is "tintinnabulation"? Well, we think you'll see it only about once a year. "Smile"? You might see that word Our goal is to show you as much information as possible many times, every day. * An audio pronunciation-and you can record your own! * Something YOU tell us! Use the "Contribute" links to tell us something-anything-about a word.

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.

Script Converter is a Google Labs product that allows the user to read a web page in a script of their choice. For example if the user can understand spoken Tamil but cannot read the script, they will be able to view Tamil web pages in English (Roman) script. We do not translate any content - we transform the words on the page to its phonetic equivalent in the desired script. We also support the conversion from non-Unicode encodings to Unicode, so that users can view pages without installing the custom font otherwise needed. Users will still need Unicode fonts. To start browsing a website, type the url in the text area, choose your preferred script and press convert.\n Currently we support the following scripts.\n\n * Bengali\n * English\n * Gujarati\n * Devanagari (Hindi, Marathi, Nepali)\n * Kannada\n * Malayalam\n * Tamil\n * Telugu

Wizer is a fantastic free tool for creating simple digital worksheets that enable learners and teachers to do some pretty complex things. When I first discovered the tool a few months back I was really impressed by how easy it was to create really engaging blended learning content for class or homework, so it's great to be able to publish this Q & A with Nira Mayorchik Sheleg the Co-founder & CEO.