Funny video: Second Life in ….Real Life!

Just to have fun….

Again about twitter potentialities…

Thanks to colleagues all around the world who are much more skilled than me I got acquainted with , as reported in the website twemes is referred to as  twitter memes-global tags from twitter.

Twemes follows tweets, that is, messages/microblogging that report embedded tags which have to start with the hash symbol (#example), even if  they are called “twemes” in the site they are usually known as ”hashtags”.

Hashtags were developed as an easy way to create ”groupings” on Twitter without having to change the basic service, through their use we can view what people in our group are talking about and we also have a connection with flickr and delicious.

There follows an example from the tweme: smielt08 ….I have just joined it!

Twimbler: how to create a tumblelog via twitter

Twimbler is a new service that lets you create your own microblog or “tumblelog” and you don’t need to have anything more than your twitter account. It fosters the sharing of authors’ creations, discoveries, or experiences while providing little or no commentary; the post formats include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video.  

There follows the instructions to Twimble in 2 easy steps:

1. create a twitter account (if you don’t already have one)
2. start your twimblog using this format: #log: http://yourlink.com (followed by a space and then by a brief comment on the link )

We know blogs are so widely used for educational purposes in language classes but I wonder if even microblogging enhanced with links as described above could provide a quicker and easier tool to be used in classroom…I will think about it! 

Classical languages and ICT

Last week I went to Brussels where there was an interesting meeting of the European Commission for co-ordinators of recently launched Comenius, Grundtvig, ICT and languages projects.

I was very impressed by the presentation of Veerle De Troyer whose past project was selected as an example of best practice; the project called “Circe”: a Classics & ICT Resource Course for Europe has been a Comenius project that involved six countries and whose main aim was to support teachers of Latin, Greek and classical civilization by identifying good practice in ICT.

In the site you can find a full description of the project along with resources and the manual that can be downloaded as a pdf file.Veerle’s presentation has been detailed and underlined all the strenghts and weaknesses of the whole process and I believe that useful inputs can be found also for teachers of modern languages.