Tips to Improve your English Communication Skills

Practicing speaking is one of the most fun and rewarding parts of learning English. Once you can speak even a little English, there are loads of ways to improve your skills quickly while having tons of fun. Here are some top tips for improving your spoken English and having a great time while you do it!

Speak, Speak, Speak!

Be confident and speak as often as possible to as many people as possibly you can! Do not be shy to make mistakes! The more you practice the better and more confident you will become in your pronunciation and vocabulary. Remember, speaking is a skill like learning a musical instrument or new sport – the only way you can get good is to actually do it!

Use technology

A smartphone can be a powerful tool for learning languages. Use it to record yourself speaking then listen back to see how your English sounds to other people. Make the most of all your favourite productivity apps to organise your practice time and make a note of all the new words you learn.

Listen

Listen to news bulletins and songs in English to listen to the pronunciation of words. You can also learn new words and expressions this way. The more you listen, the more you learn! Try copying what you hear to practise your pronunciation and learn which words in a sentence are stressed.

Read out loud

Read the newspaper or a magazine out to yourself. You could even find a script for your favourite TV show and act it out! This is a great way to practise pronunciation because you only need to concentrate on making sure you English sounds great and don’t need to worry about sentence structure or grammar.

Learn a new word every day

Choose a word you would like to work on and use practice it in different sentences. Use the word until you have learnt it and keep using it regularly.

Watch films

Watch movies in English and pay attention to new vocabulary and pronunciation. Imitate the actors and have fun with it.

Make friends

Make friends with English speakers or others learning to speak English and compare notes. Talk about things that you have learnt and exchange ideas.

Do interesting activities in English

Take a cooking course in English or join a book club! Anything you enjoy doing, make sure you do it and communicate it in English. Using English to talk about things you enjoy will make practising a positive experience.

Have a debate

Debate all the topics that interest you with friends in English. Try to use as much vocabulary as you can to get your point across and listen to the other arguments carefully so you can argue against them effectively.

Use a dictionary

Online dictionaries often have audio examples so you can check your pronunciation and there are lots of great dictionary apps that you can take everywhere with you on your smartphone. Make sure not to become too reliant on these tools, though. Have a go at saying the words first then check afterwards to see if you were right!

By

Linda. R

Faculty in IT

Source: http://englishlive.ef.com

Virtues of a good teacher

• Should know the subject
• Should develop excellent communication skills
• Should state lesson objective and lesson summary
• Should link the lesson with the pupil’s experience and kindle their interest
• Should prepare well before each class
• Should be seen and heard well
• Should use appropriate teaching aids
• Should ensure interaction of pupils and not keep them as passive listeners
• Should avoid mannerism
• Should avoid assignment to pupils
• Should maintain punctuality and discipline through his or her examples
• Should be innovative
• Should be a life time student

By

Linda.R

Faculty in IT

A Message to My Dear Child

            

            My dear daughter seated at the table.

            Before an open book, so eager to sample;

            Historical legends and Inventions of old,

            Theories of Science, Industrial Maps of the World.

            Problems in Mathematics, Complex Chemical Reactions;

            Grammar, Syntax, Evolution and Languages of the World.

            Know my darling, that Knowledge is great;

            But only second to Imagination with its Power to Create.

            Knowledge teaches Man how to climb on high,

            Yet only Imagination will help him to cross the sky.

            When Knowledge reported , ‘ We cannot fly !’

            Imagination suggested , ‘What if we try?’

            Think how Leonardo long before planned human flight.

            And Edison from a flickering Candle led us to Light.

            How did we journey from Coal to Nuclear Fission?

            And India plan its Moon and later Mars Mission?

            So Dear Child , Fire up Imagination!

            And I’ll guide your Education to strengthen your Vision.

            Start Today! Explore you World untold!

            Speak up your Mind, Step out Confident and Bold.

            Read out the Library, Hunt down your Google,

            Write up some literature, Build up your journal.

            And  then as your Vision unfolds you’ll see,

            Planet Earth is the best place to be.

By

Waheeda

HOD

Department of English

Effective Parenting

National Science Day

National Science Day  - February 28

Rashtriya Vigyan Evam Prodoyogiki Sanchar Parishad (RVPSP) (National Council for Science & Technology Communication) of the Ministry of Science and Technology celebrates National Science day (NSD) to popularise the benefits of scientific knowledge and practical appropriation.

Various activities are organised on the day, like debates, quiz competitions, exhibitions, lectures, in which college students, school students and teachers too participate.

Every year a different theme is selected and all the forth programmes and activities are based around that theme.

The day is celebrated to honour the Nobel laureate- Sir C.V. Raman for his invention of the ‘Raman effect’ on 28th February 1928.

Whole nation takes the honour of thanking all the scientists for their remarkable contributions and dedication on this occasion.  The day attracts many young minds and motivates them to take up science as their career. It is celebrated by showcasing country’s competence in the field of science. 

Sir C. V. Raman was the first Indian scientist to be honoured with the prestigious Nobel Award in Physics in the year1930. Hence, the National Science Day holds great significance for Indian Science and scientific community.

National Science Day brings an opportunity to focus on issues related to science and technology. There are activities organised that cater to the issues needing attention and people interact with the science fraternity for mutual benefit.

National Science Day is observed to spread the message of importance of science and its application among the people. Science has contributed a lot towards welfare of humanity and this day is celebrated to accelerate the pace of development.

Raman Effect

Raman effect or Raman scattering is popularly known as an inelastic scattering of a photon.

When light is scattered from an atom or molecule, most photons are elastically scattered with almost the same energy (frequency) and wavelength as the incident photons. But a small fraction of the photons is scattered by excitation. The frequency of scattered photons is lower than the frequency of the incident photons.

Ramanujan Number

The number 1729 is known as the Ramanujan Number. It was Ramanujan who discovered that it is the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.

1729 is the natural number following 1728 and preceding 1730. 1729 is the Hardy-Ramanujan number after a famous anecdote of British mathematician G.H Hardy regarding a visit to the hospital to sec the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan

Hardy’s Words:

“ I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number 1729 seemed to be rather dull one. I hoped it was an unfavorable number. ‘No’, he replied. It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressed as the sum of two cubed in two different ways.

By

Sunitha

Dept of Mathematics.

DNA as an information storage device

Scientists have been able to store 2.2 petabytes in one gram of DNA

Since time immemorial, mankind has wanted to share and use information for later use. First, it was through the caveman paintings and symbols. Then we invented the alphabets, ideograms, numbers and other symbols. Using these, books were written and stored for future generations, in palm leaves, papyrus sheets or paper. The invention of printing brought the Gutenberg revolution, making multiple copies easily and spreading education to millions of people.

Printed books occupy space. Libraries and archives are bursting at the seams. Enter the computer age and digitization using the binary code of combining zeros and ones (0,1) for alphabets and other such symbols, and reading them using the on-off electrical signals, which has made electronic storage possible, cutting down the size and space for ‘hard copies’. Integrated circuits, processors and related electronic wizardry have shrunk the size of computers and storage devices from room-size to finger nail size.

But even so, the amount of information storable in a given ‘hard drive’ is growing exponentially. “That means the cost of storage is rising but our budgets are not”, as Dr. Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute at Hinxton, UK told The Economist he together with 4 colleagues at Hinxton and 2 from Agilent Technologies, California, U.S decided to use DNA  as the information storage device, rather than electronics. Their paper titled “Towards practical, high-capacity, low maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA” has just been published in the journal Nature .

Why DNA? Indeed the question should be ‘why not DNA”. It is a long chain, consisting of 4 alphabets (chemical units called bases and referred to as A, G, C and T) put together in a string of sequence — similar to what the English language does with its 26 alphabets and punctuation marks, or digital computers with the combination of zeros and ones in chosen sequences. DNA has been used since life was born over 2 billion years ago to store and transfer information right through evolution. It is small in size — the entire information content of a human is stored in a 3 billion long sequence of A, G, C and T, and packed into the nucleus of a cell smaller than a micron (thousandth of a millimetre). It is stable and has an admirable shelf life. People have isolated DNA from the bones of dinosaurs dead about 65 millions ago, read the sequence of bases in it and understood much information about the animal. The animal (shall we say the ‘host’ of the DNA) is long since dead but the information lives on.

DNA is thus a long-lived, stable and easily synthesized storage hard drive. While the current electronic storage devices require active and continued maintenance and regular transferring between storage media (punched cards to magnetic tapes to floppy disks to CD...), DNA based storage needs no active maintenance. Just store in a cool, dark and dry place!

In the Hinxton method , they moved away from the conventional binary (0 and 1) code and used a ternary code system (three numerals 0, 1 and 2 using combinations of the bases A, G, C and T) and encode the information into DNA. This novelty avoids any reading errors, particularly when encountering repetitive base sequences. Also, rather than synthesize one long string of DNA to code for an entire item of information, they broke the file down to smaller chunks, so that no errors occur during synthesis or read-out. These chunks are then read in an appropriate manner or protocol, providing for 100 per cent accuracy.

How much information can be stored in DNA?

Goldman and co have been able to store 2.2 petabytes (a peta is a million billion or 10 raised to power 15) in one gram of DNA.

What about the speed? And how does one read the files?

Today, the speed is slow and the reading using DNA sequencers is expensive, but in time both the speed will improve and the cost come down considerably.

What did Goldman and group store in DNA?

For starters, they stored all 154 sonnets of Shakespeare (in ASCII text), the 1953 Watson-Crick paper on the DNA double helix (in PDF format), a colour photograph of Hinxton (in JPEG) and a clip from the “I have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King (in MP3 format).

Natural selection and evolution have used DNA to store and read out to make our bodies. And we are now using DNA to store and archive the products of our brains. What a twist!

Posted By

Linda.R

HOS-LP2

BIS 

[Source: The Hindu News Paper]

ICT in Students Life

Information and communication technology have recently gained groundswell of interest. Its nature has changed the face of education over the last few decades.

For many counties the use of ICT in education and training has become a priority during the last decade. However very few have achieved progress. Indeed a small percentage of schools in some countries achieved high level of effective use of ICT to support and change the teaching and learning process in many subjects’ areas. Schools with higher level of e- maturity shows a rapid increase in performances in scores compared to those with lower level. To achieve better results in the performances of learners, the teachers should be more convinced in the good use of ICT in classrooms.

Many pupils consider ICT tools very helpful in that it helps them to do assignments and other works. ICT enables the students to meet their special needs or difficulties. It also helps to reduce the social disparities between pupils, since they work in teams in order to achieve given task.

Students also assume responsibilities when they use ICT to organize their work through digital portfolios or projects. In addition it shows that ICT has significant impact on teachers and teaching processors.

ICT help the teachers to plan their lessons more efficiently and to work in teams and share ideas related to schools curriculum.

There is also evidence that broadband and interactive whiteboards play a central role in fostering teachers communication and increasing collaboration between educators. ICT can improve teaching by enhancing and already practiced knowledge and introducing new ways of teaching and learning.

By providing a good fit with exiting practices such as interactive whiteboards and other  tools like  video conference ,digital videos and virtual stimulating the class rooms will be better and effective than  a traditional classroom environment  

Fathima.P

Librarian

BIS