Hi Everybody,

This month I will start an online ESL webcam tutoring site, ESL Webcam for Kids. My plan is to offer English as a Second Language and English as a Foreign Language to students in elementary and middle school. I am looking for someone who is interested in moderating a forum on the best children's teaching and learning activities for ESL students. I am not starting with any big investment money, nonetheless, I can pay a small honorarium for the person who takes this responsibility. Moreover, I think that there is a good research paper in this for a person who wants to evaluate online material for academic purposes.

There are a number of sites with content specifically created to address the needs of students leaning English. Sometimes ESL teachers can use non-ESL sites by repurposing them with extensions and activities to invigorate student learning.

In my years as a classroom teacher working with English Language Learners (ELL) in English Language Development (ELD), my understanding of the best way to use the Internet to teach is to take advantage of the many excellent content area resources in math, science, and social studies, as well as those specifically designed for ELL's. For that reason, I think a good moderator for this forum will be a person who has used these kinds of sites, not only ESL sites, to teach. That said, I think that we ESL teachers really want good material to use with our students to enhance ESL-specific skills in grammar, and pronunciation, as well as reading, writing, listening and speaking.

I have been gathering resources for about ten years, but I need to find someone who has extensive experience in using sites with students and evaluating them according to the following criteria:

1. Productivity
2. Ability to engage young learners
3. Good and novel use of technology
4. Creativity
5. Visual appeal
6. Interactivity
7. Ease of use

A real plus for the moderator for this forum will be a person who can look at bilingual sites in Asia, Europe, and South America. You don't have to be able to read all - or any - of the languages, just knowing what is where is useful. There are also some great sites with innovative material in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and - especially the U.K.

Last, the moderator for this forum will be a person who is comfortable using the academic jargon of ESL, EFL, ELD - whatever one calls it, but also knows how to break that code down for non-ESL teachers, students and parents who will read and participate in the forum. I would like this to be a venue for everyone to discuss and evaluate sites.

My timeline for finding someone is two weeks. I think that it will take another two weeks to set the forum up. Please let me know if you are interested in working on this. My hope is that the website will evolve into a good place for teachers, parents and students to go to get expert guidance in finding the best resources on the Internet.

One more thing - My next step will be to set up a forum topic on teaching online with a webcam. Since I am also setting up sites to teach Chinese and Arabic to children, as well as one to teach Chinese to folks headed for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China, I think it will be a good idea to look at topics such as setting up online teaching and tutoring sites from a business standpoint -, getting a job with a service which offers online teaching, as well as curriculum development, online content development, and technology. I hope that anyone who has experience and interests in these topics will contact me about moderating this topic. I realize that online teaching is new, so I would not expect to find someone who has in-depth experience, but I am interested in talking with folks who have an interest in developing their own expertise.

Take care - hope to hear from you soon,
Kathy Felts