Dear former students from ID1-112,

This term I have opened a new blog for my 113 sections which you will find

here. You can visit it if you want to. I hope you find it useful.

I truly enjoyed having you in my class. I learned a lot from you and hope you did from me too.

All the best, Berta

Final grades ...

Find your grade here.

Congratulations to Jorge S., Amnelys, Yessenia, Vanderson and Reinaldo as the most prolific commenters and readers of the class blogs. Thanks for dedicating time and effort to this activity. I hope it was worth it.

Some suggestions for ID1-113:

1) Start learning new vocabulary from day 1 (units are content-based and deal with the universe, evolution and artificial intelligence). The faster you learn certain frequent terms about these three topics, the better.

2) Read, read, read ... do not stop until the end. Texts are much longer and you have to train yourself to keep on going (later you can re-read as many times as needed. Skim, skim, skim to get the general idea).

3) Always review whatever was covered in class. Dedicate at least two hours a week to keep updated.

4) Practice reading internet sites about the mentioned topics, if possible. Also check the reading section of free online exams such as TOEFL, IELTS or GRE. Google them and check different links until you find exercises that suit you.

You will always find me at my e-mail and probably in my office, in case you want to see me or talk to me next trimester.

All the best. Muchos cariños y éxitos. Berta

Departmental grades

The average was 12.9/25, quite low, but that is always the case for second departmental exams every trimester. Some students are very tired and even fall asleep during the exam ... we had one in our group today Zzzzzzzzz ;-) Others have already figured out their grade and know they will not make it to 4 or 5. And sometimes it is simply that the material to be covered is harder in the second part of the course.

Here are the results. Congratulations to Johanna, Irani, Vanderson and Kleiber. Your grades are higher than in the first departmental exam. Other people, unfortunately, lowered their score up to 9 points less than in their first exams. I will be in my office Monday and Wednesday from 9:30-11:30, in case you want to check your exams.

BTW, thanks for completing the questionnaire today. Your suggestions will definitely help me make things much better next time. Enjoy the class photos. I am sure they will be a great way to remember the times we shared together this trimester!!! Best of luck on your other evaluations !!!

Some grades ... inference and conclusion exercises

I scanned some exercises where there are conclusion and inference multiple choice questions. I hope you have the time to do them and get some practice before our departmental next Friday. I also included the answer key at the end. Please write to me in case of doubts (bleiva@usb.ve) Best of luck !!!

Click here to see your results in today´s exams. Kleiber noticed there was a confusing situation in the vocabulary quiz (bind vs. tie) so I took it into consideration when correcting. Most of you felt the argumentation quiz was too difficult. I corrected it quite leniently and the results are relatively satisfactory for most of you. If you think that you could improve your grade if you took it again, please let me know and I will set up a new argumentation exam next Wednesday (as I had originally planned).

Homework debate

Here is a discussion on homework at the university level. The transcript is in this site, in case you do not undestand the audio. There is also a quiz to check your comprehension in that page.

1) Is there a balanced view on this subject, just one point of view or more than one position?

2) Do they include evidence or facts to prove their positions?

3) What is YOUR position? Do you think there should be homework or not?

Do you need to be told what to do or are you responsible enough to do what you are supposed to?

Exam practice

As I had mentioned in class today, here is the sample of our argumentation quiz.

Prof. Gilberto Berríos designed this multiple choice quiz on line and is quite helpful. Remember to write your name so he knows who is taking it. It is good practice for departmental exams. It is timed to 70 minutes, so be prepared to spend some time in front of your computer. Try it out. It is worth it (=vale la pena).

What do aye-ayes have in common with this boy?

In class we read about the way this animal probably uses sound to find its food. Watch the following video about a fourteen-year old boy, Ben Underwood, and try to look for similarities. Write your findings in the comment´s area. There is a longer video about him here.

Is it safe to use cellphones while driving?

I wonder if there were any accidents during our Easter break due to cell phone use. Do you think that they might be a cause of death on the road?

Go to this page to read about two studies on the subject. After that write about your reactions in the comment´s area.

The machine is us ...ing us

Watch this video to check if you are a digital kid from the 21st century.

How close do you feel to Web 2.0 technology? How much do you know about what is going on in the world of Internet? Do you just chat and send email or is there something else you do? Have you ever set up your own webpage, blog, wiki? Are you registered at Facebook, Myspace, Hi5 or any other social network? How often do you surf the net? Do you know what Del.ici.ous is? How about rss?

You don´t have to answer all of these 8 questions but we would love to know more about you and your net habits and knowledge.

Last song syndrome = song-stuck in your head

In our unit on hypothesis, there are three aspects we will be identifying in the articles we read:

1) the problem or phenomenon.

2) the hypothesis or hypotheses in the article to explain the problem or phenomenon.

3) facts and opinions.

Read the following web sites (1, 2, 3) and identify these elements. Write your answers in the comment´s area.

Have you heard about LSS? Has this phenomenon ever happened to you? Had you thought of a possible hypothesis to explain this phenomenon?

By the way, here is a sample of the next hypothesis quiz.

Songs and Language learning

Adriana mentioned in a comment last January the use of captioned TV to improve reading in English. Then Fabiana said songs could be helpful too. Now I want to check with all of you how much you think songs influence language learning.

Has it ever happened to you that you hear a catchy song and then it is in your mind for the whole day or the whole night and you might even wake up listening to the song playing inside your head? That is the song-stuck-in-my-head phenomenon or last song syndrome mentioned in the next post.

Educator Tim Murphey conducted an analysis of the lyrics of a large corpus of pop songs and found that they have several features that help second language learners. They contain common, short words and many personal pronouns (94% of the songs had a first person, I, referent and are written at about a fifth-grade level); the language is conversational (imperatives and questions made up 25% of the sentences in the corpus); time and place are usually imprecise (except for some folk ballads); the lyrics are often sung at a slower rate than words are spoken with more pauses between utterances; and there is repetition of vocabulary and structures. These factors allow learners to understand and relate to the songs (Murphey, 1992). A further benefit of pop song lyrics is that their meanings are fluid, and, like poetry, allow for many different interpretations (Moi, 1994).

Find lyrics to songs here. Which is your favorite song of all times, by the way?

Mine? I love songs by Linking Park but "Under Pressure" by Queen is my most favorite one. I can listen to it over and over again for hours. See its lyrics with translation here. To listen to it, press the yellow play button.
Berta
Jorge S.
Luis V.
Justo
Amnelys
Gilberto
Luis S.
Reinaldo

What might await in your future

Although this slideshow has a lot of information about the United States, China and India, there are some predictions based on certain facts that might relate to your future.
Did you find something surprising, alarming, untrue, speculative, interesting in the slideshow? Write your thoughts in the comments area.

No class Monday March 3rd: Back pain

I got a mechanical contracture in my lower back which probably resulted from sleeping at a wrong angle (I had to take care of my mom all this week at a hospital and I had to sleep in a chair for two nights).

I have an acute back pain and a hard time trying to sit. So, this is the deal:

1) We will not have class on Monday 3rd but we will meet next Wednesday, probably in the big lab second floor, to watch the video of this week and then have class.

2) I expect EVERYONE to have read and completed the reading and exercises of "What happens when you drink?" on a separate piece of paper to hand in.

3) Go to the Mayo Clinic link to watch a slideshow on back pain. Identify if what I have is a spasm, a strain or a sprain according to the cause. Tell me what recommendations I should follow to relieve my pain. Write your answer and explanation to your answer in the "comments" area of this post.

Today in class and ... university student drinking

I know some of you had a hard time getting to class today as there were local residents obstructing the way in Tazon to protest about their situation, ( lack of water or milk, criminality, etc., who knows, it can be any or all of these and more).

Just 12 students showed up in class and we discussed and checked: if clauses (when they are certain, probable, improbable or impossible), probability using modals and certain words, identifying hypothesis and distinguishing between fact and hypothesis (Focus on Reading pages: 146, 147, 148, part of 149).

Then we reviewed the text on Dinosaurs, checked answers and finished page 59.

Since there is a Physics exam this Friday, almost all students preferred to do pages 43-46 ("What happens when you drink?") as homework and leave earlier today, although we did discuss about alcohol drinking, designated drivers and some consequences of drinking heavily at this stage of your lives. The assignment should be handed in next Monday in a separate piece of paper with your name on it (pages 45-46 of reading guide).

If you want to read more about tips to survive university student drinking, you can check here and more facts about the effects of alcohol you will find here.

How much do you know about dinosaurs?

Yesterday we read about possible theories on how dinosaurs disappeared.

But did they die because they were too heavy? There is one explanation called the Gravitational Hipothesis. Click here to read about it.

Later, you can take a quiz on dinosaurs . Always answer the question at the top of the screen (there is a lot of unrelated information at the bottom)

If you have time, solve a vocabulary puzzle. It is timed (90 seconds to do it) and you can check the "hints" button if you have no idea of what the possibly words are. I hope you enjoy it.

More on Tsunamis

One of the most terrible tsunamis of modern times hit Indian Ocean shorelines on December 26, 2004. That tsunami is believed to have the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. Some 200,000 people were killed in a single day.

Click here to watch a 3:27 minute video from National Geographic in case you want to know more about this topic that came up in one of our class activities this week. It takes some time to download and even has an IBM ad before it shows, but very effective for visual learners like me. Tell us if you found new information or what you found interesting, shocking, revealing, thought-provoking ...

Are you an auditory learner? Do you learn better when you LISTEN?

Check this link, where not only you will be able to read but also listen to a study about "sleep".

After reading and listening to this text, tell us if you would change your sleeping habits and why. Was there something in this research that had an impact on you to make such change? Did you find cause-effect relationships in this text?

In case you liked this link, here is another.

Sample departmental test

My colleague, Prof. Gilberto Berríos, created this exam for his students last term which resembles our Departmental Exam. There are 25 questions with three alternatives and the test has a time limit of 1 hour 30 minutes (exactly like the departmental exam). Please write your name and last name so he can keep track of the test because his students will be taking it too and he will like to know the results. I hope you find it useful.

Strain gauge: How does it work?

BINGO!!!

I went to the link in our side bar that helps us find how something works and wrote "strain gauge", a word many of us were not very familiar with from page 134 in today`s exercise on cause-effect. Well, here is a link to a place that gives us more information on the use of this device to measure the weight of trucks that run in North American highways.

Reminders ...

The departmental exam will be week 6, Friday February 22nd at 11:30 in room MEM317. Do not forget to bring your ID card in case something unexpected happens and a different professor comes that day ... one never knows so it is better to play around with Murphy´s Laws.

Your homework for this Wednesday is from page 32 to ... of the reading guide and the text is entitled "Clouds in the Greenhouse". A nice diagram that explains this effect can be found here.

Einstein´s biography: Chronology

Here is a 4 minute and a half video about his life. I hope you can undertand it.

Was there something that caught your attention about his life. Write about it in the comment area. Is there information about him in this video that is different from the one you read in you guide last Monday?

Extra practice on Main Idea

This week there were several people who were not really sure about the difference between main idea and purpose of the author. Here are some reading exercises on biographies (texts of chronology) from Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. where you are required to select the main idea of the texts. There are also vocabulary and inference exercises. I hope they prove useful to you.

I am also including more sites with exercises for practice in the "links" area of the sidebar on the right of this page.

Comments are welcome.

Your brain needs you to know about ...

Last week, we mentioned some of the ways your brain needs you in order to function more efficiently and help you learn. Drinking water and staying hydrated is one. Find more about your brain in this powerpoint presentation.
After you watch it, write a comment on the information you found most surprising, interesting or helpful to you and why. If you want to know more about your brain needs, click here.

| View | Upload your own

What do you perceive are your main problems when reading?

You probably have some idea of difficulties you still have as you are reading texts in English. Why don´t you share them with us in this blog entry ... we would like to know more about what happens in your mind as you read and also about some of your reactions to texts for science and technology. Is there a specific event that always comes up? Blocked, confused, uncertain or perhaps overconfident and cool ? Let us know.

How to write comments in this blog

1) Click in the word that says "comment" at the bottom of the post you want to write a comment about. A new window will open, like the one in the illustration on the left.

2) there will be three options: a) "Google/blogger" account, b) "Other" or, c) "Anonymous". I suggest you select the second alternative, write your name in the provided space and make the comment. If you select "anonymous", write your name at the end of the comment so we know who you are. Don´t forget to write the green characters that appear for "word verification" and click "publish your comment" before you close the window.
Para instrucciones en español sobre cómo hacer los comentarios, presionar aquí.

Welcome to ID1-112

Dear students from ID1-112:
This will be the place where we will keep in touch throughout this term.I hope you get used to visiting this site, try to bring creative ideas on how to read better and more efficiently in English and make comments about our activities, strategies, materials, etc.How well and how often do you read in Spanish, how well and how often do you read in English?There is a saying in English that says: "Practice makes Perfect" ... so let´s do it, let´s start practicing as much as possible, keeping effective learning and reading strategies in mind. To have an idea about the use of blogs in a reading class, visit this one we had last term.
All the best.