Betty – one of the wonderful teachers at Lalor LLC – spent a fair bit of time creating some activities in powerpoint, that let her students match images with audio. But then she found this website “English Guide” (dot org), and decided it was much better to use resources that someone else had already made.
“They have everything,” she exclaimed delightedly. Every theme and topic you could want for low-level English as a second language (ESL) learners.
What a good point this teacher has made! Why spend hours creating learning materials, when there are existing resources out there already?
Please give us some feedback in the comments below – what are the best internet resources you use for teaching ESL?
Yes there is lot of material up there and I use internet to get lot of ideas. Yet I think each class is different and I feel, knowing my students, I create assessments that will allow students to express their knowledge in best possible way.
[Editor, Michael replies]:
Hm, yes Shruti. There's a few different ways to share online resources..
(=> social bookmarking like diigo, scoop.it, delicious,
(=> wiki work – ie build up a page of links around a theme,
(=> documents in the cloud for example google docs or dropbox, )
I wonder which would suit our teachers the best?
Yes, everyone who comes from the Lalor LLC wiki should be able to see these comments. They might need a google account to comment though ;-(
Good points Shruti, thanks for your comments. It's definitely important to tailor your material to the students in each group.
I wonder if there's a way for Lalor teachers to share the online resources that we find … could we use the wiki for this?