Llengua anglesa a primària. Competència digital

When working on-line and needing to have a dictionary at hand, it is very useful to know some web pages to look up the meaning or the translation of the words.

In this practise we will explore some pages and we will search for new ones to analyse their validity and usefulness for us as a teacher and for our students.

• Go to the main page of the Merriam-Webster’s on-line Dictionary (http://www.m-w.com/). It is a good English-English dictionary and Thesaurus as well as a Spanish-English translator.

In this practise, you are going to focus on the meaning, so select the Dictionary reference and enter the word “training”.

• Click on Search. A new page with the list of the entries found will appear. Select the entry Training and click on Go.

• You can hear the word by clicking on the speaker icon and it is available the definition of the word as well as its pronunciation and function.

Notice that on the right frame of the screen you have the possibility of searching the word in the Thesaurus dictionary, translate it into Spanish (be careful with this option. It is not very reliable!), browse words next to it or browse the dictionary by alphabetical order. You can search in the Encyclopedia Britannica too.

• Go to the main page of the Dictionary.com Translator (http://dictionary.reference.com/translate). It is a good Spanish-English translator. But please note that the translators may not produce a perfect translation. In most cases it should adequately convey the general sense of the original; however, it is not a substitute for a competent human translator.

Although the page allows us to enter the Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, all pages and the web, etc. in this practise we are going to focus on the meaning, so we will stay in the Dictionary reference.

• Select the language and the localization.

• Type or paste the text you want to translate. To test this translator, type the sentence “La formación del profesorado es útil y necesaria” in the white space and click on Translate.

You will have the following result:

To translate a new word or text, move the scroll bar down and type it in the white space.

Through the Merriam-Webster’s on-line Dictionary (http://www.m-w.com/) you can access the Word Central for Kids dictionary (http://wordcentral.com/) to use in class. It offers your students in cicle mitjà and cicle superior the possibility of playing with words. Have a look at the Cafeteria (buzzword section where you can listen to the word, know its definition and use and make a quiz).

Other sites to visit are:

• Cambridge dictionaries on-line (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/): English-English dictionary.
• OneLook Dictionary Search (http://www.onelook.com/).