Before Wednesday, I usually used
Google when I wanted to search for a website. The search engine shows all the websites (usually a huge number!) containing the words you searched for, with no distinction of their effective relevancy. What a waste of time!
If I found an interesting site and I wanted to save the URL, I could write it down on a piece of paper, or save it using the ‘Favorites’ button. If I lost the piece of paper or I used another computer, I had to search the URL again. What a pity!
Fortunately,
Sarah taught us to use another useful tool that lets us save time:
Del.icio.us. It is a
social bookmarking website that allows you to save, store, and share your favourite websites online.
Del.icio.us is completely
free and can be accessed from any computer; after having registered, you can start searching for the websites that interest you. You write one or more tags and Del.icio.us finds all sites that had been saved with those
tags. You will find a relatively smaller number of sites than that retrieved using a searching engine, but these sites are surely more pertinent! It’s fantastic! You can also see how many people saved a certain website and what they wrote about it on their notes. Their comments can really make your search easier!
You have the possibility to create a list of your favourite websites; for each of them, you will be asked to write the URL, a short description, your notes and the tags. Your bookmarks are public; this means that everyone can read them. This activity, in fact, is called ‘
social bookmarking’ since it’s a sort of mutual exchange: you can read and use others’ bookmarks and they can use yours. It’s wonderful!
Finally, you can create your
network in Del.icio.us, by saving the usernames of the people you want and check their favourite websites. I added my peers on my network and I checked their ‘
Favorites’; I liked very much the work they did and I chose to comment one bookmark for each peer.
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Silvia’s choice:
Wordreference
“This website contains free online dictionaries. It can be very useful when you're translating! As a matter of fact, it contains both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.” (Silvia)
I chose this bookmark, since I use it every time I had to translate a text. It’s really useful! It contains English, French, German, and Italian dictionaries and there is also a forum where people can discuss about their doubts when translating a word or a sentence into s foreign language. Cool!
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Marina’s choice:
Web Concordance
“A useful tool when you need to know a collocation. You simply have to write a word and the concordancer will give you a list of examples from the corpus you have chosen.” (Marina)
I think this is a very useful tool, especially when you want to use a word, but you aren’t sure about its position and context. I had already used a similar tool when I wrote my paper and I found it fantastic! I had to search for the occurrences of several words and, without a specific programme of web concordance, it would have been impossible to do my searches!
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Elena’s choice:
Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab “A free resource for ESL students who want to practice their listening skills. There are many listening quizzes (Pre-listening/Listening/Post-listening activities) dealing with several topics taken from everyday conversations, but also from interviews.” (Elena)
I found this website really interesting and useful; I immediately tried to practice my listening skills, and I think I will use this fantastic tool very often! I appreciated the fact that I could choose the level and the topic I preferred. Among my ‘Favorites’, I saved two websites that contain grammar exercises and listening quizzes!
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Camilla’s choice:
How to use English Punctuation“Small and useful guide to the use of English punctuation.” (Camilla)
I think that this is a concise, but very clear and useful guide to the correct use of English punctuation. I saved another website about this topic among my ‘Favorites’; I think that English punctuation is sometimes very different from the Italian one and many doubts can arise when translating a text into English. For this reason, an easy online guide can be really helpful!
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Martina’s choice:
National Public Radio in US “You can access hourly news summaries and 24-hours programme stream. It’s a US public radio.” (Martina)
I think that it is a useful website where you can find a large number of news regarding several topics. You can learn a lot about the world’s news and you can also listen them; in this way, you have the possibility to improve your listening ability.
