News time

A tea shop in Newtown yesterday arvo

A couple of weeks ago we were discussing how to get better in English. Helen was saying that she would like to do more work listening to the news. We can both read news from the newspapers and listen to radio or tv news. Let's start today, Answer this poll and keep watching it. It will keep changing as people do it. We will see which type of news people prefer.

Get your own Poll!




Here you have a very good site, Behind the News, produced by the ABC weekly. Watch the 26th episode. There is a permanent link to it in ELS links on the right hand sidebar.

Ask me to give you a print out of the exercises. Today I would like you to concentrate on the segment Copyrtight Crackdown. You can just watch one segment (part) of the whole program by clicking on it on the right hand side of the BTN screen.

In the college Learner Support Centre (B1.19), you can listen to many radio news items with exercises to extend your vocabulary and understanding of the news.

Creative Commons Photos

Last Friday I met Peter Shanks, a TAFE IT teacher from Bathurst. He showed me a great tool designed by him that allows you to find pictures that don't break copyright. They are flickr photos that have a Creative Commons licence, like the ones I showed you last week in class. Creative Commons means that you can use them for free, as long as you show the attribution details, which means that you write the name of the author and a link to where the photo comes from (in this case flickr).

To find a photo you just write the name of what you are looking for in the Find window and then click on the picture you like. If you do it with the tick in the edit box, you can edit it before you save it, add words to it and a frame. You can add the attribution inside the picture itself or copy it and paste it on your blog below the picture. You save the picture as usual, by right clicking on it and storing it in your computer.
Ideally you should link the photo to its original page in flickr.

I'm leaving a permanent link to this tool below Useful Links in our righthand side bar.

This is and example I edited for our Money money week.

Original image: 'Money' by: Joshua Davis
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51194339@N00/8806988
Released under an Attribution-ShareAlike License