Florida Teacher Uses Blog and Creates a Free Online Magazine for ESOL Classes

Susan Alyn, US

Susan Alyn graduated in 1997 from the University of South Florida's College of Education with a Master's degree, and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. In addition to ESOL, she is certified to teach Elementary Education and Art. Susan has taught students in primary and secondary, as well as adults in adult continuing education, and credit courses at Valencia Community College and the University of Central Florida, both in Orlando, Florida, USA. Email: 2sja@pobox.com, www.inspirationlane.blogspot.com

An ESOL certified teacher in Florida took a blog one step further by creating a new, free online magazine, and her efforts were recognized by Texas State University's CALICO organization.

A little over a month ago, I read an archived news article about a college now being sued because professors dismissed students from their classes too early. Having taught in a local private college where my adult ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) students looked forward to the last few minutes of class -- as that's when I took them to visit different web sites - this Florida teacher decided to create a free online classroom magazine to help other ESOL teachers, by providing them with a meaningful way to utilize every minute of class time with students.

With only limited skills on how to build a web site, I decided to just stick with the standard blog format available from a site popular with bloggers. I researched online to find suitable content to add to my own ideas for this magazine, and was delighted to learn of a company with free content that automatically changes each day, as this aligned with my goals for the new magazine. The result was InspirationLane.blogspot.com

I felt good about creating this site, because I know: Teachers often feel overwhelmed with demands being made on them in today's world of education, and teaching English to non-English speaking students is very challenging. Also, teachers in classrooms with SMART boards or computer stations have additional needs for classroom resources that are online and offer new content daily.

Although technically simple by many standards, my online classroom magazine web site caught the attention of Texas State University, home to CALICO, an international consortium of professionals involved in education and technology. CALICO decided to include my site on their website, and to create a new category to do so. You can see the CALICO listing for this teacher-made website here: https://calico.org/p-221-%20Organizations.html

My new web site has already received hits from countries as far away as China and Thailand, as well as from colleges all over the USA. And, the emails from professors have been very positive. I continue to use my Blogger screen name on the site, and am eager to see how many ESOL teachers in high school and college actually use this new site. I know they will find it to be a big help to them in the classroom.

InspirationLane.blogspot.com can be found on the World Wide Web at:
http://www.inspirationlane.blogspot.com

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Humanising Large Classes course at Pilgrims website.