Web Hosting: Put Your Teaching Portfolio Online

It’s popular to have a blog and a website these days for teachers. They serve many useful purposes. It’s a way to reach out to potential employers and to students. It’s a great way to have the look of a professional teacher. It’s also an important to control positive information about yourself since you can combat any negative information a former employer has left about you.

One reason that teachers should have web hosting is that they can put their resume online complete with information, photos and teaching portfolio. By having it all online, it’s easy to let employers see for themselves the teaching quality that you can offer.

Another reason to go with web hosting is that you can keep in contact with your students. A blog is great for disseminating information about yourself and your teaching while a forum is a great way for students to stay in contact with each other. By maintaining the website yourself, when you change schools, you can still maintain the same site and the same contacts with students.

When buying webhosting, you’ll also want to buy a domain. I have looked through a lot of companies and Netfirms usually has some of the cheapest prices combined with the best services. That why I suggest that teachers get their domains from Netfirms. They have a special offer on inexpensive and cheap domains. Check them out for sure.

When it comes to hosting, I suggest HostGator. They have some really great reviews and they have a lot of plans to choose from. I particularly like their most popular hosting plan. It’s a pretty good plan and certainly worth a look. They have several to choose from so you are sure to find what you are looking.

Once you have your domain and hosting, you are set. You can start making your online resume stand out.

Build Your Vocabulary

I remember when I was back teaching GMAT and GRE classes just how important a strong vocabulary was. We would always chastise our students to improve their vocabulary if they wanted to get a good score.
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Using Social Networks For Teaching

There are so many social networking sites out there these days. They are a great way to connect with friends and family back home, but more than that, they are a great way to connect with students. It’s a great way to get your students practicing their English in a fun and interesting environment. Setting up a social networking account for your teaching is a great to really connect with your students and communicate lessons and homework.

As you know, there are several social networking sites out there. I am impartial to Friendster. It’s a great place to set up a full featured page to communicate with your students and put up videos, music and even a blog.

A good runner-up is Hi-5. Hi-5 has many of the same features as Friendster and your students may already be a Hi-5 member. This could be good or bad.

So what is the deal? Do you use Social networking sites in your teaching? Which sites do you use?

Utilizing A Student Forum

I am really encouraged by the use of new media in education. I think there are so many benefits to using this type of media in improving the educational experience of the students. I have previously talked about ensuring that you have web hosting to put your teaching portfolio online and it’s overall effectiveness. I barely touched upon the use of forums for your students to keep in touch with each other.

While it is a lot of work for you to maintain a student forum, there is a a huge benefit that comes from being able to interact with your students in a positive manner. You are able to have your students positively communicating about your lessons and best of all they are doing it in English.

One example of a forum for students is EnglishESLForum by the infamous Topper, the nemesis of TEFL School Reviews. While none of us may agree with his actions, his forum is a good example of something that works for the students. It allows the students to communicate and share their thoughts, in English.

The question pops up whether to do the forum as a school project or as a personal project. From personal experience, I suggest doing it as a personal project and make it clear that it is from the get go. The beauty of this arrangement is that when you leave the school, your forum can go along with you to your next school. It also is a nice bargaining chip when the school knows that your students will still be using the forum once you have moved on.

Yahoo Answers For TEFL Classes

I came across a great idea for an activity for students using Yahoo Answers. Yahoo Answers is a service on Yahoo that allows you to both ask questions for those things you don’t know and give answers to the questions that you do know. It works out nicely because people with knowledge to share will gain knowledge and those interested in gaining knowledge will learn more.

By now, your brain is probably running through all of the different activity opportunities. My favorite activity is to give a each class member an assignment that involves asking one question on Yahoo Answers and then providing 10 answers to questions. Give them one week to complete the assignment and then have them present their question to the class. Have them also read off 3 or 4 of the answers they gave when they shared their own knowledge.

There is a lot of pre-work that can be done with this activity. You can teach how to ask a question properly, how to answer a question properly, you name it. You warp and morph this activity to fit any need you have in your class. Best of all, it’s a lot of fun for your students.