Going beyond English Teaching websites

In this task, we worked with Julieta Grassino Oliva, and Johana Dajan, so as to reach a conclusion concerning the reliability of the websites we, as teachers or teachers-to-be, face every day.

The websites we analysed were related to English teaching in the way that some of them could be used as a resource to design our own materials to finally use them in the classroom , and some others were to be used directly in a lesson, by means of a digital activity they provided. The web pages we analysed are The British Council and the ESL-kids.

These two pages are totally different to one another. ESL-kids provides you with materials to work in your lessons such as flashcards, worksheets, songs and descriptions of games. It also provides some advice and lesson plans to work with children. On the contrary, The British Council is more complete since it is divided in four sections, Teaching English, Learn English, Learn English kids and Learn English Teens. In all of them, there are many exercises to practice pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary among others. Furthermore, each of them is directed to different kinds of audience, such as kids, adolescents, adults and teachers, with specific information and activities of interest for each group.  

What we did with these web pages was first to analyze them in terms of their reliability, and then to create activities to work with a specific group of students, where we could use both pages together, since they provided us with very useful material within the same topic. We learnt that important criteria have to be taken into account before using the material, such as: authority (who the author is, if it is an organization or a person we can communicate with), objectivity (if  the information is biased or not), accessibility (if there is the possibility to access easily to that webpage), among others.

We do appreciate this task because we learnt to understand how a web page is organized and its reliability when using it, since we, as teachers or teachers-to-be, should take many things into account before “trust” is blindly directed into it.

Here you have the links to the webpages we analyzed, click on them and see for yourself!

ESL-kids: http://esl-kids.com/

British Council: Learn English: http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en