Do you smell a rat?

Back after a short break, I thought I'd write about some fun things that were launched on the (unsuspecting?) world yesterday.

The first - Google Nose.  Here's how Google describes this new feature on Youtube:

We're excited to announce our newest addition to Search: Google Nose. What do wet dogs smell like? Google Nose! How about victory? Google Nose! Try searching on Google for "wet dog" and explore other smells that people sniffed for, or visit google.com/nose to learn more. Happy smelling!

http://youtu.be/VFbYadm_mrw

The second story comes from the UK.

Dexter the internet crime sniffing police dog

Cyber crime is on the rise and online fraud and identity theft are major issues these days, that's why the Get Safe Online team have teamed with the City of London Police to utilise the talents of Dexter. He's a police dog that can sniff out crime through a desktop computer.

https://www.getsafeonline.org

Cute doggy!!  And clever too!

And the third story appealed to the teacher and linguist in me:

From Twitter:

"Starting today, we are shifting to a two-tiered service: Everyone can use our basic service, Twttr, but you only get consonants. For five dollars a month, you can use our premium 'Twitter' service which also includes vowels." it saysin a blog post. "We’re doing this because we believe that by eliminating vowels, we’ll encourage a more efficient and “dense” form of communication. We also see an opportunity to diversify our revenue stream. Here’s our mockup of the most retweeted Tweet of all time as it would appear in the new Twttr.

wttr.com
Twttr will roll out slowly to a small percentage of users, growing to 100% over the next few days. We recommend that you practice using only consonants (and “y”) with the hashtag #nvwls (or if you have paid for our premium service, use#icanhasvowels).

To make the transition easier for you, we’ve built a site that automatically transforms your Tweets into a Twttr friendly format. Try it today at twttr.com.

And just in case you're wondering what the connection of the above stories is, 

They all appeared yesterday, April 1st!

Stories from Italy

Back from Italy now - fantastic trip from all angles - I met loads of great people, shared activities with many, many teachers and learnt a few myself too!

Every day in Italy, there was a session on storytelling.

In Turin, Marcus Tubby told us a story about the Frog Prince.

As you can see in these photos, I held one line of the story (washing) line.  ( I mentioned this in my previous post).

Marcus gave a set of pictures showing the different characters and elements in the story to two 'volunteers'.  They had to peg up the pictures in the order they were mentioned in the story.

Marcus has put the pictures and the story on his blog here.

And two days later in Rome, Norman Cain from International House Rome had us listening to and telling more stories.  The slides from his presentation are available here.

A short (working) week here in Spain - Thursday is a national holiday and so is Saturday.  I'll upload another post before I head off to London - I love London in December (well actually, at any time of the year!!!)