Labor English Zone 8th Anniversary

Labor English Zone started on 6th December 2009. Since then we have published 1000+ posts and have received over 66,000 visitors who have viewed more than 280,000 pages. Our busiest day was 11th May 2010, when our hits peaked at 122 visitors (we guess the following day there was a pbl deadline or some kind of exam!!). Posted on February 27th 2010, the song If you give a little love, you can get a little love of your own, with over 3,000 visitors, has been the most popular one during these 8 years.

We want to thank you all for being there and for your visits. We would like to encourage you to send us comments and messages with your ideas and suggestions for new posts. We are interested in hearing what interests you.

To celebrate we are 8 years old, we publish again our first post, "The Italian Man Who Went to Malta":

6th December 2009

Let's begin with some humour. Italian and Spanish are arguably the hardest accents to get rid of. Practise pronunciation drills and try to polish your accent in case you go to Malta too!!

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

The Futility of Comparing Yourself to Others, by Leo Babauta

(Reblogged from Zenhabits)

One of the biggest reasons we’re not content with ourselves and our lives is that we compare ourselves to other people.

Picture it: you see photos of what someone else is doing on Facebook and think your life isn’t exciting enough. You see someone else who has a cool job and think you’re not doing that great in your career. You see someone with a hotter body, and feel bad about yours. You see someone who has created an awesome business, and think you’re not doing enough. You read about people who are traveling the world, learning languages, going to exotic resorts and restaurants, and wonder why you’re not.

The Next Cabaye: Iago Aspas

Who's Cabaye? The answer is here

(Reblogged from Peripheral Vision)

Scouting isn’t rocket science! Every time a Premier League side signs a good foreign player the nation goes crazy. Who is this mystery guy? Where did he come from? Anyone with a decent knowledge of the game outside the UK would have known that the likes of Santi Cazorla, Oscar and Papisse Demba Cissé were likely to succeed, and there are plenty more of them out there. So who’s the next “secret” star to watch out for? Who is the next Cabaye?

The Benefits of Learning Languages

Reblogged from La luna de Babel

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

Labor English Zone 3rd Anniversary

Labor English Zone started on 6th December 2009. Since then we have published 600+ posts and have received over 23,000 visitors who have viewed more than 42,000 pages. Our busiest day was 11th May 2010, when our hits peaked at 122 visitors (we guess the following day there was a pbl deadline or some kind of exam!!). Posted on February 27th 2010, this entry about school jokes, with over 3,000 visitors, has been the most popular one during our first three years.

...and after all this time things can only get better: As you probably know, we have to boast our new writer at LEZ, Raquel LP, whose contribution and insight are truly invaluable.

We want to thank you all for being there and for your visits. We would like to encourage you to send us comments and messages with your ideas and suggestions for new posts. We are interested in hearing what interests you.

To celebrate we are 3 years old, we publish again our first post, "The Italian Man Who Went to Malta":

6th December 2009

Let's begin with some humour. Italian and Spanish are arguably the hardest accents to get rid of. Practise pronunciation drills and try to polish your accent in case you go to Malta too!!

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

Things Never To Say To A Teacher

(Reblogged from Singing Pigs)

A short little piece inspired by the tenth student in fifteen minutes to inquire about a test.

1. Have you graded our tests yet?

No. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a Scantron machine. Good thing, too, because to my knowledge, Scantron machines cannot grade short answer or essay questions which make up the bulk of your test. And while I do consider myself a reasonably intelligent human being I have not yet perfected my reading skills to complete ninety, four-page tests in one hour (which is exactly how long it has been since you walked out of my classroom) even if I weren’t teaching the rest of the day or preparing your classes for tomorrow. I reassure you that the second the tests are graded, the grades will be posted online because (also contrary to popular belief) I have better things to do than get my kicks by keeping already-graded-but-still-unentered exams around my house for added decor or extra toilet paper. Even though I’m paid peanuts, even I can afford toilet paper. So scoot your butt out of here and let me start digging through this pile o’ trees I just killed in the interest of furthering your education.

'Celta on the Attack', by David Cartlidge

ESO Students,

We give you now a post by David Cartlidge last 27th March (incidentally, Día de la Reconquista in Vigo).

Vigo’s a city used to being under attack. The Middle Ages saw Vikings successfully raid on several occasions, before Francis Drake came along in the 15^th and 16^th centuries to much avail – the Turkish even had a go later on. Now, the football team in the city are making their own attack – their most calculated in years.

Labor English Zone 2nd Anniversary

Labor English Zone started on 6th December 2009. Since then we have published 500+ posts and have received over 17,500 visitors who have viewed more than 26,000 pages. Our busiest day was 11th May 2010, when our hits peaked at 122 visitors (we guess the following day there was a pbl deadline or some kind of exam!!).  And if you google us you will obtain 2,700,000+ results. Posted on February 27th 2010, this entry about school jokes, with over 580 visitors, has been the most popular one during first two years.

We want to thank you all for being there and for your visits. We would like to encourage you to send us comments and messages with your ideas and suggestions for new posts. We are interested in hearing what interests you.

To celebrate we are 2 years old, we publish again our first post, "The Italian Man Who Went to Malta":

6th December 2009

Let's begin with some humour. Italian and Spanish are arguably the hardest accents to get rid of. Practise pronunciation drills and try to polish your accent in case you go to Malta too!!

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

Blogs & Sites at Labor School

ESO Students,

As of today, your teachers at Labor School offer you up to 17 blogs and sites, 10 of them targeting ESO contents. 1 more blog (French Language) is soon to be published. Please visit them regularly and take advantage of all the hard, good work your teachers are carrying out for your benefit.

Sundays

On 30th July 2010 at LEZ (Labor English Zone) we told you about 1000 Awesome Things, a website listing the small things that make us smile on a bad day which has become a worldwide hit. They have just published their number 275 wonderful thing (as they started counting back from 1000): Sundays.

We are sure most of you will like and agree with what they have written:

It’s a beautiful day.

Don’t let it get away.

Now whether you’re holding hands in church, running with your dog at the park, just taking a break from the world, or just sleeping in till it’s dark, well … Sunday’s a good time to relax and enjoy some smaller moments:

1. Worship the Sun and ice cream. The word Sunday was originally named after “Sun’s Day” — just like Monday was “Moon’s Day”, Saturday was “Saturn’s Day.” Now it’s come to include giant bowls of ice cream, chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and nuts. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a chance to worship both on a wobbly picnic table on some sandy grass by the water.

2. Couch potatoes unite. Sunday is the perfect time to practice the ancient lost art of Completely Lazing Around. Curl up on the futon with your boyfriend during the ballgame, pop open a pizza box with your pals for kickoff, or flip the recliner beside Grandpa for a marathon session of bird chirps and whispers during golf.

3. I’ve got all my sisters with me. After wading through work and before diving back in again, it’s time to pause and enjoy quality time with your friends and family. Maybe it’s a holiday dinner at Grandma’s, maybe you’re visiting dad in the home, maybe you’re dining out at college, or maybe you’re laughing with friends on the phone.

Yes, sometimes if you’re lucky the world slows down a bit on Sundays. Today we say when those highways unjam, when phones quit their buzzing, when your tensions untangle … it’s time for some Sunday loving.

AWESOME!

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

New Feature at LEZ: Podcasts

Labor Students,

As of Thursday 4th February you can subscribe to our podcast and/or download in an MP3 format the files for every article we have posted on Labor English Zone. 

Just click on the icon on the right-hand column, under the "Search this blog" window, and you will find a list of all the posts ready to listen, download, link or stream. And note that the text content is embedded into the audio file and can be viewed through the lyrics option of your iPod and on some other mp3 players:

Or you can listen to a post while you are reading it simply by clicking on the icon at the beginning of each article:

Go to our Podcast Page and click "subscribe" so you can listen to our content on the go on your iPod, MP3 player or mobile phone. It is great listening & speaking practise. You'll love it!

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

Twitter in Plain English

Hi there ESO students,

We are sure many of you have already joined a social network, most probably Tuenti and/or Facebook. Although you are very young, if we had to give you some advice about which one you should join, that would be unquestionably Twitter, a microblogging service where you can share short, byte-sized updates about your life.

If used properly, Twitter can be a very powerful learning tool where you can find plenty of useful resources. And, of course, you can meet lots and lots of interesting people and keep in touch with your friends and contacts.

If you still don't know very much about it, watch this very interesting, easy-to-follow video, Twitter in Plain English.

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

Phrase Mix - Learn REAL English with new English phrases every day!

PhraseMix.com is a site that helps you learn natural, native-like English. PhraseMix introduces new English phrases each day. These phrases are carefully chosen to be:

• Natural. 
• Useful.
• Memorable.

The idea behind PhraseMix is that people don't speak a language fluently just by learning single words and grammar to stick them together with. Instead, fluent speakers remember longer groups of words that often go together. Having these combinations memorized makes it easy to know what you're going to say next.

PhraseMix teaches NATURAL language

Most language classes and textbooks teach a formal style of English that isn't used in most real-world situations. That's why most students who have studied English for a long time in school have trouble. They complain that they don't understandwhat people are saying when they speak to native English speakers.

PhraseMix is organized around different situations that you might find yourself in. The phrases we teach are all realistic, natural responses to that situation. If the phrase doesn't fit into a common situation, we don't teach it. So you don't have to worry about learning English that sounds "strange".

PhraseMix only teaches the most USEFUL phrases

There are other websites and books that teach you English phrases, but a lot of them focus on phrases that are "interesting" to native English speakers, but might not actually be very common.

Other English learning sites which teach phrases focus on idioms, which are long phrases that have a different meaning than you'd expect from the meanings of each of the words. Common examples of idioms are:

• It's raining cats and dogs.
• The early bird gets the worm.
• I have two left feet.

But PhraseMix also teaches you common word collocations. Collocations are simply words that often come together. For example, people usually use the word "nice" before "day":

• It's such a nice day out.

People use the word "nice" more often than "fine" or "good", even though each of these words has a similar meaning.

PhraseMix makes it EASY to memorize phrases

PhraseMix explains each new word and grammar point, but what we really want you to do is to memorize the phrase at the top of each post. The sentences are shortand don't include too many difficult words. The situations are specific and easy to imagine. And once you've memorized the phrase, it should be easy to remember the words and phrases that are part of it.

There are some more tools coming in the near future that will help you memorize the phrases even better. Subscribe to the email newsletter to get a weekly summary of the phrases, and be one of the first to find out about new services.

Find PhraseMix on Facebook, Twitter, read their blog, or join their e-mail list, all of it for free.

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

100 Followers!

On Thursday 14th October 2010, just two months short of our 1st anniversary, we have reached 100 followers. Thank you all for joining Labor English Zone!

Remember you can also read us and sign in as a follower on Facebook.

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only

1000 Awesome Things

A website listing the small things that make us smile on a bad day has become a worldwide hit:

1000 Awesome Things

Snowy days, having a whole row to yourself on a plane, popping bubble-wrap, finally untanging a really big knot, hitting a row of green traffic lights... these are apparently the little things in life that make us smile.
How do we know? Because a website called 1000 Awesome Things (which is dedicated to small pleasures such as these) has struck an unexpected chord with millinons of people round the world. Indeed, many are finding it provides an instant antidote to those days when everything seems to go wrong.
It happens to all of us and it is this kind of identification with its readers' lives that has made 1000 Awesome Things such a big hit.
The blog is the brainchild of Neil Pasricha, a 30-year-old Canadian who describes himself as a " boring guy who works in an office and eats frozen microwave suppers". He was having a bad year when he came up with the idea for his blog.
"I had lots of personal problems," he said. "My marriage was heading the in the wrong direction, my best friend was in a bad state of depression and the papers were full of heavy stuff: polar ice caps melting, pirates storming the seas, the economy on the verge of collapse."
One chilly night in June 2008, to help him find a way out of the gloom, he decided to start a blog that would target "one simple awesame thing every single day".
Unfortunately, his year then got even worse: "My wife came home from work and said, 'I don't love you any more', and so we sold our house and I ended up in a tiny apartment. Also, my friend committed suicide."
Pasricha decided he had two choices: "wallo in gloom and doom, or grieve and get on". So, despite everything, he continued to blog. Every night, when he got home from work, he forced himself to think of just one happy event.
To start with no one noticed, apart from his mum and dad. But soon his simple yet clever idea was drawing in fans. A growing number of people round the globe, it seemed, were eager to read about the joy of switching from a queue in the supermarket to a freshly opened checkout lane; of finding that the socks from the dryer all matched up; of seeing one's luggage again after a long flight
Within a year the website had won the Webby award for best blog of the year. It has now had more than 17 million hits, attracts 50,000 visitors a day and has spawned a bestselling book in the United States, not to mention translations in countries as diverse as France and South Korea.
In the process of brightening up other people's lives, Pasricha has also changed his own. A television company has asked him to write a series based on his blog; las week he gave the  keynote speech in Washington for a conference on the next generation of government leaders and he is in great demand as a motivational speaker.
The secret of the blog's appeal, he believes, is that it embraces small events as if they are being experienced for the first time. "I'm not special," he insists, "I just write about the sweet things in life."
Such as? "I love three-year-olds," he muses. "The way they stare at caterpillars, go slack-jawed at baseball games or pick a handful of dandelions for a vase."
You may not identify with all of his "awesome" moments, of course. His whimsical catalgoue takes the form of a countdown that started at 1,000. After he embarked on it, a friend said: "Do you realise you're only going to be done on April 20th, 2010?" He has yet to miss a day. By his desk (he works as a human reosurces manager), he keeps scrap paper so he can jot down ideas as they come to him.
When he's stuck, he goes out to "grab chicken wings and beer with my friends" and asks them what's made them laugh that day. "It's not too hard," he says.
"When I'm lying on a couch and someone throws a blanket on me, I smile and think, that's awesome! When I put on warm underwear straight out of the dryer, I smile and think, that's awesome!
"We all have these moments: you don't really need us to point them out."
Writer: Christina Lamb (International Culture, The Sunday Times)

Hi everybody,

My name is Neil and I’m a no-name 30-year-old guy who  started 1000 Awesome Things back in June, 2008 with the goal of writing about one awesome thing every weekday.

I did this as my life was falling apart. My best friend took his own life and my wife and I went different ways. We sold our house, I moved to a tiny apartment, and I tried to get things back on track by talking about one simple, universal little joy every single day — like snow days, bakery air, or popping bubble wrap.

Internet travelers from all over the world supported awesome things from the start and sent it to friends who sent it to friends. New people seeing the site helped us win the Best Blog award two years in a row and land a book deal.

This Spring The Book of Awesome comes out everywhere.

Honestly, this is just incredible and I’m totally shocked and overwhelmed. But more than anything, I just want to say thanks.

Neil

p.s. Here are a few of my favourites:

#980 Old, dangerous playground equipment

#864 Mastering the art of the all you can eat buffet

#858 The other side of the pillow

#780 Squeezing through a door as it’s shutting without touching it

#720 The final seconds of untangling a really big knot

#675 Wordless apologies

#654 Peeling that thin plastic film off new electronics

#601 Getting through it

#525 That teacher

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

Glogster - Poster Yourself

Create your own poster: www.glogster.com

Simply put, Glog is a kind of poster - fully designed by yourself! Glog is a fancy creation from text, images, music and video. No matter if it is colourful, straightforward, showy or emo. Your Glog will stand out. It gives you a perfect tool to express yourself.

Find new friends and promote your Glog

Glogster has many cool features. You can create your own posters, get in touch with new friends, promote your Glogs on the Internet or browse the Glogs you like. But that’s not all. You can comment and rate other’s Glogs, get the G points, attract your fans, see other’s profiles and inspire yourself with their design. Just try and create your own Glog! No need to register.

Why is Glogster so unique?

No other site gives you a chance to be so creative! Just read What to do with Glogster, make your first Glog and show it to your friends!

Text

Tell the others what you think about yourself, about love, friends, school or about the world. Simply write what you have in your mind! Just choose the design you like and write a poem, joke, greeting or a love letter.

Images

Don’t forget to add images! Choose the best of your own pictures or the pics you got from the Internet. Cool celebrities, cartoons, characters, glitters or art. Just add them to your Glog and make it fancy.

Music

Words and pictures isn’t enough? Pump it up with some audio! Show the others what kind of music you are into. Pop, rock, hiphop, electronic, jazz or techno. Just upload your favorite mp3 or listen to the music on other Glogs.

Video

Have your own video? Watch your favorite band’s clips every day? Upload it to your Glog. It is easy: you can use videos from your fav video sites. Make your Glog rock and add a video or even a movie.

Teachers

Glogster has recently announced Glogster Education, specifically designed with schools in mind.

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

Use your English in London

Hi there, 4th ESO Labor students. If you intend to join our school trip to London late in June you should check Use your English in London, a blog by some students from a public high school in Madrid. Here you will find lots of useful information and experiences: London scenery, buildings, objects and places, means of transport, on the streets of London, and many more interesting links. Check it out!

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

Sing your English

Sing your English is an EFL blog by Paloma Barrancos Lillo, English Teacher at García Morato High School in Madrid. Her blog is meant for students from beginner to senior level, or anybody who wants to brush up English as a Second Language. Enjoy the musicality of English and sing along! Don't feel ridiculous and try! Play the video, and read the song. Then try to see the video and remember the words. You'll sing along very soon after some repetitions. You can suggest your own in the comments. Please do. Any good idea will be more than welcomed.

Here you will find songs (alongside their videos and lyrics) by Alicia Keys, Queen, Tokyo Hotel, Michael Jackson, Rihanna, U2 and virtually any artist or band you can think about. And if you check the labels you will find them grouped into different grammatical topics.

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.