Group A: Elena B

Hello to everybody!
I don’t know if somebody shares my opinion, but I think that e-tivity 2 was quite difficult. Yesterday night I spent a lot of time searching for interesting blogs on the topics that I chose but I don’t believe I succeeded. Technocrati web site offers a lot of possibilities but the majority of the selected blogs has nothing to do with the topics I was interested in. So I changed my tags, especially the second one, a lot of times…
TAG 1. The first tag I looked for in Technocrati web site is Business English. There are mainly two reasons for this choice. The first one is that at the University of Padua there isn’t a specific course for this micro-sector of English but I attended a course of Business English when I was in Ireland four years ago and now I’d like to go into it more deeply. The second reason is that two weeks ago I started to teach English and Spanish in a private institute for students who failed in the Secondary School and now want to attend two years in one in order not to lose school years. Since they come mainly from technical or accounting kinds of Secondary Schools, they are very interested in Business English: how to write a business letter, how to answer properly to the phone or how to do a good presentation of a project and so on… When I typed the words “Business English” in the web site, I was logged on only to one blog and even written in Italian! Not satisfied I clicked in one of the web sites at the end of the page and I logged on a really interesting web site called Business EnglishPod.com (www.businessenglishpod.com ). This is a very helpful web site for people who want to learn something about Business English. The thing that really strikes me is that there are video to watch and listen, online exercise (filling the gaps, quiz, comprehension exercises) and for every activity you can calculate your final score. I’ve tried one of the online activities and it was very funny. The problem is that only some samples of online activities are free, but to take advantage of all the possibilities of this blog you have to sign up and pay. If you want, you can also sign up only for a free trial of the new online practice exercises. Always dealing with this subject another interesting blog is http://eslincanada.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/english-vocabulary-for-fixed-income-investments/ where you can find a list of vocabularies for fixed income investments with their explanation.
TAG 2. The second word I looked for blogs is Pollution. Scrolling on the page I noticed an interesting blog called Surfing Magazine Blog http://actionsportsgroup.net/blog/ing/?cat=4 where issues of pollution and world environment are discussed. I focussed on a curious piece of news about thousands of volunteers involved in the action of sweeping NJ beaches clear. In addition, there are some other appealing posts dealing with alternative energies, new proposals for the usage of our resource and other nice things.
Observation of the style: I think that the two blogs that I’ve chosen are two peculiar blogs because thay are quite serious and the topics they deal with are hard and difficult. There’s one thing I’ve noticed in almost all the blogs I visited: the clearness of the layout and the simplicity og the design. What’s more, posts are always written with large fonts that appeal to your eyes and catch your attention. I think it’s a good technique in order to encourage people to read your blog.

That’s all for now!
I hope to have your opinion about these things…
Bye!