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You really should try this...
OK, so there are a lot of translation sites out there but this is the best we've come across for a while.
lingro is an on-line environment for people learning languages. lingro's dictionaries remember all your translations and help you learn the vocabulary most important to you easier and faster.
Enter a website address into the address box on the lingro home-page, select your language, click on the arrow and...
...you get the chosen web-page in a lingro frame. Clicking on any word in that frame will bring up a pop-up translation of that word into whichever language you've chosen.
Languages available at present are English into French, German, Spanish, Italian and Polish ( & vice-versa). A record is kept (and saved, on registration) of every word you've "looked up". The lists can be used as an aid to learning vocabulary.
A boon for ESOL students & us bloody lazy Brits who can't be bothered learning another language.
http://lingro.com/
The title of this post is actually the title of a post by Karl Fisch on his Fischbowl blog. This post has been nominated for the "Most Influential Post" in this year's Edublogs awards.
I'm not going to comment on the post - check the rest of this blog over the past few years & you might come to the conclusion that he's just saying something a wee bit more openly & succinctly than I've been willing to do here.
Just read it. Vote for it. Make a senescent librarian happy for Christmas.
But remember, a librarian isn't just for Christmas, but for life...
http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2007/09/is-it-okay-to-be-technologically.html
And whilst we're on about the Edublog Awards here's a list of the nominated library sites:
There seems to be something inherently suspicious about anything that is freely available. Sometimes I feel like a psychology experiment, handing out tenners on Sauchiehall Street to general public rebuke.
Listen. This is free (or at least freely available under the terms of a Creative Commons licence) & it rocks!
OpenLearn is the FREE (that word again) online learning service of the Open University. At present there are 361 course units available in Arts and History, Business and Management, Education, Health and Lifestyle IT and Computing, Mathematics and Statistics, Modern Languages, Science and Nature, Society, Study Skills, and Technology. I would particularly recommend the Care units in the Health & Lifestyle section if, indeed, a non-academic is allowed to do so.
There's an awful lot more, some of it less relevant to our curriculum. Go on. Discover! Remember learning for learning's sake?
http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/
Firstly: 55 Ways To Have Fun With Google
You probably use Google everyday, but do you know... the Google Snake Game? Googledromes? Memecodes? Googlesport? The Google Calculator? Googlepark and Google Weddings? Google hacking, fighting and rhyming? In this book, you’ll find Google-related games, cartoons, oddities, tips, stories and everything else that’s fun. Reading it, you won’t be the same searcher as before!
The book contains over 220 pages and is available to buy at Amazon UK for £14.20.
You can also download the full book as PDF (or Word)... it’s free to share & remix & do fun stuff with.
Plus: Google Guide : Making Searching Even Easier
Google Guide is an online interactive tutorial and reference for experienced users, novices, and everyone in between. I developed Google Guide because I wanted more information about Google's capabilties, features, and services than I found on Google's website. --Nancy Blachman
http://www.googleguide.com/
Much as we librarians decry Google (and are utterly dependent on it). our people (staff & students) use it. They might as well use it properly.
Warning FE Finance people. This costs money!
This archive will eventually contain the digital reproduction of every page, article and advert published in the Guardian (since 1821) and the Observer (since 1791 – the oldest Sunday paper in the world). For this launch the archive covers the period of 1821-1975 for the Guardian and 1900-1975 for the Observer as we are still working on digitising the remaining material. From early 2008 onwards the entire archive up to 2003 will be available – more than 1.2m pages covering all major historic events over 212 years as reported at the time.
Good news is that until the end of November, you can have 24 hour access for free! Normally this would cost £7.95, which doesn't seem that bad to me for what looks to be an excellent resource. And anyway, if you want 24/7 access to the latest Guardian / Observer publishings, NewsUK (link to the right) provides that for free, gratis & for nothing.
http://archive.guardian.co.uk/
Help your students from Eastern Europe (& the rest) with this useful news aggregator.
This service is based on a simple observation; as Europe continue its development, more people migrate, communicate in different languages and follow news from nearby countries. A transnational European platform which allows people to follow a variety of topics is needed and Imooty.eu aims to fulfill this demand. Specifically, Imooty.eu seeks to identify the information landscape of Europe and to facilitate easy access to the most important news sources of the continent.
http://www.imooty.eu/
Source: JISC RSC Scotland S&W
Despite the presence of our First Minister, Glasgow will host the 2014 Commonwealth Games. So congratulations on that. What chance of a profusion of HNCs in Commonwealth Games Marketing / Admin, etc. I just hope that the denizens of Dennistoun (et al.) get something out of this...
Talking of First Ministers, wasn't it Tom Nairn who wrote that Scotland would not be free until the last minister was strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post? Whatever did he mean?
See Glasgow? See erudition!
