Our First Podcast!

Great job everyone! Listen to your first podcast in Let's Talk, if you are at home, or in our f2f wiki, if you are at TAFE.

What do you think? Listen carefully and think of how you could improve your pronunciation.
You can listen and write what you say. Check the pronunciation of words you are not sure of in a dictionary, an Internet dictionary, your teachers or a fluent speaker.

Write your impression of your first podcast in comments. Suggestions on how to improve it are most welcomed!

Our Country

Make a Smilebox photobook

We have been talking about Australia in class this week. This is a photo album with pictures taken by my brother and myself while he was visiting Sydney last month. On page 7 there is a video of the Blue Mountains which gives you a good idea of the Australian bush.

• Go to our esolf2f wiki and add the Oz Quiz questions you prepared in class yesterday. Remember to check your email to activate your membership in the wiki. You have to open my invitation email and follow the instructions it it. Take turns to do the questions, as it's not possible to have 2 people working on the wiki at the same time.
• While the others type, search the Internet for information about Harmony Day. Write a post in you blog about it. Call it Harmony Day. Visit the post from last year's Harmony Day.
  
• Tomorrow add a recount to your Harmony Day post. In it tell everyone about what we did to celebrate Harmony Day at St George College.
  

• Why don't you have some fun while you practise your spelling? Check this video and spell all the names of the people in it. You can check your spelling easily because they repeat the questions and add subtitles with all the names correctly spelt in writing.

Aussie culture

We had such an exciting week last week! Your library short talks (or not so short...) were a great beginning to improving your English oral skills. You've started writing your blogs, commenting on each other's blogs, Rita started writing in our esolf2f wiki, Dina managed to write in our world map (finally someone had access to it!), Diana wrote a comment (which hasn't been published yet!) on a teacher's blog post about spelling and keeps us entertained while the presenter writes on the white board. Mitu gave a presentation on a Mathematics book (I'm afraid most of us are very green on Maths... ). Veena got our attention when she talked about the Titanic, didn't she? Asa showed us a fantastic book about Sydney then & now. Mercedes made us think about Colombia in a new way and Cellena got us thinking about saving money. You are such an informative & interesting group!

Now let's start work!

• Jovanna talked about a very interesting book, 1000 questions and answers about Australia. Let's see if you can do this Oz crossword.
• Wang and Aleya talked about Australia history. Alan said he's studying for the citizenship test, What about writing our own quiz? Let's try to do it in our esof2f wiki (ask Rita what f2f means). Each one of you should write at least 2 questions about Australia history, Australian culture or slang. Why don't you start by doing this Oz Quiz my students wrote a while back? You can check the links below the quiz, the slang dictionary in Time4English and this Australian government website to get some answers/ideas for questions. Once finished we'll publish it and everyone has to try and answer all the questions.
• Finally, listen to Andrew's podcast. Read the article that some students wrote about it and ask Andrew more questions about what he says when you see him tomorrow.

• Remember to add photos that are copyright safe or your own photos. In tutorials links (right sidebar) I have a link to a very good post on how to find photos on flickr. Have look at Marion's bubbleshare & smilebox photo albums. If you want, we can create one for our class.