The advanteges and disadvantages of using blogs in the English classroom

Nowadays English is the universal language and is a requirement for the majority of the works. Also it is the language that you must know to study in other countries. For this reasons there are many courses to learn this language. However all the people that know a little bit about other language know that one of the most efficient ways to learn something is practicing it.
There are different ways of practice English. You can listen to music in English, see movies without subtitles, speak with different persons or write in English. This last activity is very important because develops and improves the grammar and the vocabulary. In my course one way of practicing writing in English is using the blog. This tool is a web site where you can write and anyone who want to can see it.

The advantages of using blogs are many. First of all, its a new technology that helps the pupils and the teachers to learn using Internet for the classes. This is great because Internet is a very important tool nowadays. Other advantages of working with blogs is that this website is a space where the student can write about his hobbies and personal interests. The blog is also a web site that all the persons can see and comment on it. So, the blog can be used to evaluate the English but also to know people with the same interests that yours.

However some disadvantages of using blogs are that you only practice the writing. Other disadvantage of working with blogs is that the assignment doesn´t include pronunciation, wich is one of the important topics on English learning.

In conclusion the blog is a tool that has more advantages that disadvantages. It´s a good way of learning english and use technology.I hope that this activity continues.

However, I hope that the teachers could add more assignment with free topics in the future.

See you later!

bye!

The article Summary!!

Today I'll show you a summary I've made of an article of Psychology. This article called "Working in a complex intersection: Healing disaster trauma in a foreign culture" was written this year by Alan Krohn and it belongs to the American Psychoanalyst Magazine 41 Volume.

This article relates the work of a group of psychoanalysts (psychologists) in Sri Lanka. This trip took place in year 2005 and 2006, and its objetive was to study the post-tsunami mental issues that people there suffered. The first case that this article relates doesn't have a big relation whit the tsunami, but I think that it's a very interesting one and it show us how the unsafe conditions that the tsunami left can affect people from there. It's about a 14 year old child who was assaulted by a man while she was urinating.

The man stole her a chain she was wearing, and then forced her to hold some liquid in his mouth, so she couldn't scream while he ran away. After this the child had visions of this episode and fear to walk alone in his enviroment. She said that the man didn't do anything to her, she only was afraid because she thought that he could kill her. Curiosly the girl fainted every day at 8 o'clock, the same time of the assault she suffered. This was explained by the big stress her body felt at that moment. This is a typical symptom of hysterical cases. Finally the author psychologist discovered that thecause of the girl's problems was not her feelings issues but a chemical that has entered her brain. This is a particular hysterical dynamic. They resolved this problem with weekly sesions of therapy.
The final conclusions that the group of psychologists took from this trip was that Sri Lanka was a place with a totaly diferent culture, so the ways of concibe issues as the self concept are different, so they, as occidental psychologists, should study the culture in a deep way to apply all their kwnoledge to the Sri Lanka reality.

The link is http://www.apsa.org/Portals/1/docs/TAP/vol41no1.pdf

visit it!

bye

The film of the day!!

Hello! today I’m going to talk about a movie that I would like to recommend to you.


Well, actually it’s not a movie, it’s like a documental. This documental called Baraka and is about the diferent kind of
human cultures that life in our planet.
This film consist in a lot of images of nature and unknown places of the word but this documental has not any actors or dialogues!!!
This film was directed by Ron Fricke and was filmed at 152 locations of 24 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Nepal, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States.

The title Baraka is a word that means blessing in many different languages. In this film the images are always enclosed with a very special music. So the music and the fantastic images create an absolutely great and special atmosphere.

The most interest things that the documental shows us are all kind of human tribes of different parts of the world. It allows us to see the most estrange and particular rituals. It’s really fantastic and impressive. Then the documental gives a radical turn and begin to show images of the city and modernity.

So, at the end of the documental you ask your self about which are the best ways of human living, if all this that we call progress is actually better that the uncivilized ways of living. Does this progress improve our life or doesn’t it? I really like this documental, because it makes you think in a very deep way without the need of any dialogue or an actor’s performance.

The blog of Lisette

hello!!

I should evaluate one of my classmate`s blogspot and I chose the blog of Lisette. The title of the blog is "Chica de Ipanema" and it has personal descriptions of Lisette. Lisette's blog is greenish and has different photos to complement the articles. At this moment she has two post in her blog, one about her favorite website and other about her favorite art work. In her first post she put that her favorite website was google. That is amazing because my favorite website is also google!!. I agree with her, google is the best website in the world!

In her second post she chose an art work of Rodin called "the kiss", and she wrote about the history of this sculpture and described when she saw this work for first time. She wrote a lot of this sculpture, i suppose that she likes very much this art work.

Well, I like very much this blog because I think that she writes very well in English and the topics that she chose are very interesting. Also the color of the blog is very nice. My favorite post is the second article about "the kiss" because this sculpture is beautiful and she wrote a very complete history. The weakness of this blog is that it does not have many post to read, only two post!. I hope that in the future this blog has more articles and maybe could have links to interesting web sites.


The link of the blog is http://taulisinha.blogspot.com/

bye!

Rodrigo

The school of athens

Hello!

One of my favorite paints is "the school of athens" or "Scuola di Atene" in Italian. This art work was created between 1510 and 1511 by the artist Rafael Sanzio. Who was one of the best painters of the renaissance.This fresco was created to decorate the Apostolic Palace. Julio II asked Rafael to paint it to decorate the room. In our days this work is located in the Raphael's rooms in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican.This fresco represents the philosophy of this epoch because this painting shows one session of the classic philosophers. In this fresco you can see the most important philosophers, mathematicians and scientists of the ancient greece but they are in a classic Roman architecture , not Greek.

Aristoteles and Platon are the central figures of the painting. Platon is supporting the "Timeo" and Aristoteles supports a copy of his "Ethics to Nicómano". They have a discussion about the search of the truth. They show with his expression his ideas about where the truth is . The old Platon indicates with his hand to the sky alluding to his theory of the ideas. In contrast Aristoteles indicates to the floor to explain his theory about the nature.
This painting shows other important philosophers as Socrates, Pitagoras, Epicuro, Parmenides, etc.

Well, I saw this work for the first time in my school. My teacher of philosophy showed me this picture and said "this painting shows the fathers of the phylosophy".
I agree with my teacher and i like very much the philosophers that shows this painting. In general I admire the culture of the ancient greece because they invented the democracy, the sciences and the politic life. For this reason i like very much this painting

Also this painting is full of symbols and if you know about the ideas of the philosophers
you can see that everything the figures in the paintings do, is related to their ideas and theories.

I hope you like my post and the painting that I presented!
see you

bye!

My favorite WebSites

Hello

I usually like to visit many different websites but my favorite one is Google. For me Google is the most interesting website in the word because in this websites you dont find any information however you can find all the different websites that with the information that you need. Google enables users to search in the Web.
My friends like so much google that they say: GOOGLE IS THE NEW GOD!!.
Really I dont think that google is god but i believe that this website revolutionized the internet because before google all the most important website were Portals. In those websites you can find information, news, games, etc but always with limited resources. In google you dont have limited resources because there are many different websites where you can obtain information.
For this reason the google website is very useful to obtain many information about one topic.

I know this website when i was fifteen years. my brother showed it to me because i needed information about the chilean history.
Actually I visit this page two or three times in one day.

Well, I hope you like my post and see you later.

the link of this website is www.google.cl

Bye!

Rodrigo