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A Personal Website for Effective Teaching |
Claire Bradin Siskin cbsiskin@pitt.edu
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Ways in Which a Teacher Can Use a Personal Website: |
How to Make a Successful ESL/EFL Teacher's Web Page by Charles Kelly,
The Internet TESL Journal, June 1997
http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/Articles/Kelly-MakePage/Guidelines for Designing a Good Web Site for ESL Students by Charles Kelly,
The Internet TESL Journal, March 2000
http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/Articles/Kelly-Guidelines.htmlHTML Crash Course for Educators by Andy Carvin
http://sunsite.unc.edu/edweb/htmlintro.html
Freewebspace.net (Searchable guide to free webspace providers): http://www.freewebspace.net/
GeoCities: http://geocities.yahoo.com
Personal reference:
The best way to keep track of your own favorite and frequently-used links is to put them on a web page. This works better than having them in a bookmark, which is dependent on a specific machine or diskette.
Once they are on the web, they are accessible from anywhere. This is a way of organizing your own "space" on the World Wide Web.
Information for students:
Any information that students ask for again and again! Examples are given of different types of information that creative ESL/EFL teachers are putting on the web.
Links: Is it a waste of time to make pages of links to other sites?
No! Such pages can serve to create some order in the chaotic World Wide Web and guide students to the sites we want them to use. If you assign students to visit various websites, it's much easier for them to work from a web page that you've made from these links than from a bookmark. As with your own favorite links, your students will be able to access them from anywhere -- not just your computer lab.
When you put the links on a web page, you can annotate them and add assigments, graphics, etc. Such pages can be arranged in attractive, logical layout to suit your purposes and their needs.
Course syllabi
Ron Corio's Advanced Reading and Vocabulary course http://www.vcu.edu/cspweb/,982/,982rv/skd982rv.html
Course Description:
Aichi Institute Of Technology's English Conversation by Charles Kelly http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~ckelly/english1.html
Assignments
Have students get class assignments from the web rather than wasting valuable class time in copying them from the blackboard. When the assignments have to do with the web, it's easy to put in links to relevant sites for them to visit.
Example: Have students go to World Time Server.com at http://www.worldtimeserver.com/
Ask them to write sentences about what they find out. "When it's 7:29 pm in Michigan, it's 3:29 am in Kampala, Uganda."Practice quizzes
The Internet TESL Journal's Self-Study Quizzes for ESL Students
http://iteslj.org/quizzes/Language exercises
Ruth Vilmi's Buzz Words of 1997
http://www.hut.fi/~rvilmi/LangHelp/Grammar/buzz.htmlRandall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab
http://esl-lab.com/Online Courses
ESL Cafe Web Guide: Online English Courses
http://www.eslcafe.com/search/Online_English_Courses/Student publications
Student Projects at the English Language Center at Michigan State University
Tom Robb's Kyoto Restaurant Project
http://www.kyoto-su.ac.jp/information/restaurant/index.html
Share information with professional colleagues.
Post material on the web and refer the information-seekers to the appropriate website. I frequently receive e-mail requests for information about CALL and lab planning, so I refer people to Planning a Language Resource Center at http://edvista.com/claire/labplan.html
Presentations at conferences
Have a one-page general handout with a URL at the top, and put the rest of the text on the web. By doing this, you can cut down on printed handouts. They are expensive, and people don't want to carry home all the paper. Since many references nowadays are on the web, people will appreciate having the addresses as hypertext on the web. If they have these in printed form only, they will have to type in the URL's by hand. The material is then accessible long after the conference is over. If someone misses the session and wants the information, just e-mail the URL.
Handouts from recent presentations: http://edvista.com/claire/pres.html
Put your resumé on-line, and it will be instantly accessible to whoever needs to see it.
If you're concerned about the philosophical and social implications of all this, check out the following:
Writing Oneself in Cyberspace by Daniel Chandler http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/homepgid.html
The Presentation of Self in Electronic Life:Goffman on the Internet by Hugh Miller
http://ess.ntu.ac.uk/miller/cyberpsych/goffman.htm
Copyright 1998 Claire Bradin Siskin. Permission is granted to copy and distribute this text for educational non-profit use only. This text may not be mirrored (copied onto another website) without my permission.
*Originally presented at the TESOL WebFaire '98
Also presented at the TESOL 2002 Internet Classics Fair
http://www.edvista.com/claire/personalweb.html
Last modified: April 5, 2002