Sam's Class: May 2005

Friday, May 27, 2005

Academy of Achievement, Ask Jeeves, News Videos from San Francisco

Here is a very interesting site that has interviews and stories about people who are thought of as being very accomplished and prominent here in America. They come from different professions and by choosing one of their careers like actor (which you'll find under "The Arts") baseball player (listed under "Sports" or doctor listed under "Science and Exploration." To see and hear the interviews, you'll need to use a home computer unfortunately, but you can still read and enjoy them.

Academy of Achievement: Academy Careers

Google is a very good search engine and most of us use it almost all the time. Sometimes though, we have to stop and think about what to put into the search box to get the information that we want. Here is another search engine that you might like to use. It's called Ask Jeeves and when you go to this site you'll be able to ask a question in a regular sentence and then get your answer that way. For example, if you put- How do I fix my computer-in the search box and then click on search you'll find many different answers to your question if you scroll down the page.

Ask Jeeves - Ask.com

Every city in America has it's own TV and radio stations. Sometimes it's interesting to watch the video news broadcasts from a city or state other than the one that you live in. Here is a TV station from San Francisco in California and if you watch their video segments you'll be able to compare them to watching ones from Portland. Remember that you can replay them as many times as you want so listen for new words that you can look up later.

abc7news.com: Video

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Vocabulary from Newspapers, Image Search, Word for the Wise

Reading the newspaper is a very good way to both keep informed on current events and improve your vocabulary. If you see a word that you don't understand, write it down and you can check out both it's definition and pronunciation at our favorite talking dictionary. Merriam-Webster Online Of course, some newspapers tend to use more difficult words than others. The one that I'd like to recommend to you generally uses easier words, so I think that it's a good place for you to start. It's called USA Today and I hope that you like it. After you click on the link below and go to their website, look in the upper left corner for the word "News" click on that or any of the other sections like "Travel" , "Money" or "Life" and you'll go to a new page where you can read stories related to that section.

USATODAY.com - News & Information Homepage

There are several ways to find images (photographs) on the internet. I wanted you to know about how to do this for two reasons. Firstly, it can be fun and interesting to show your new friends photographs of your homeland. Perhaps you'll also be writing a report for a class that you'll be taking later and you'll need to find a photograph or map to include. Now you'll know where to go for them. Our favorite search engine Google at google.com has what is called an image search. Just click on the word "Image" it's underlined and written in blue letters and it's right next to the word "Web" above the search box. After the next page comes up, just put the name of your homeland or anything else in the search box. Then just click on the grey "Search Images" bar and you'll see a page. Remember that there are usually several pages so be sure to look for additional page # at the bottom. There's another image search service as well and it's called Corbis. First go to:

Corbis: stock photography and digital pictures

Do you see the search box? It's in the upper left corner of the page. Just put in whatever you want to see a photo of and click the bar where the word Search is written in white letters. This site will give you several pages of images too but the page # are listed above the photos to the right of the page.

Here is a new service from our dictionary. It's called "Word for the Wise" and if you click on one of these words or phrases you'll see a brief article. If you click on the littlle red speaker icon (like the one that you click on when you want to hear a word being pronounced when we use the dictionary) you'll hear someone reading the article and of course you can replay it as often as you want to. I hope that you find this to be useful. First go to the website Merriam-Webster Online Look down the left side of the page and look for the word "Home" . Look for where it says "Word for the Wise" under that.Then click on where it says "Archive". When you get to the next page you'll see a long list and yo can click on any of the words or phrases and listen. As always, please feel free to e-mail me if you have any difficulty using these sites.