Website Resource: Web English Teacher

-       Website address:  http://www.webenglishteacher.com/index.html

-       Copyright:  ©2000-2011 Web English Teacher

-       Credentials:  Web English Teacher is run by Carla Beard who has been an English teacher since 1975.  A full list of her education, professional experience, and profession activities is linked to her brief biography.  She started Web English Teacher to be an online place for all English teachers to share their experiences and ideas with others.  She calls it, a “faculty workroom on a global scale”.

-       Website Design and Ease of Navigation:

This site doesn’t have the very best visual appeal, but the home page is organized and un-cluttered.  There are two main components to the site:  a blog, called “chalkdust”, and educational resources.  The homepage features the latest blog entry and a list on the left that organizes the education resources by small content area (grammar, prose, poetry, media, etc…) 

Chalkdust takes you away from the original site, which I found to be inconvenient.  Otherwise, I found navigation to be pretty easy within the rest of the site.  The organization of the lesson plans and resources makes finding specific activities simple, and the list of the areas is always on the left side of the site.  Within each area, the activities are not organized by grade level.  You would have to read through each activity to find the grade level it was designed for, which could be very time consuming.

-       Response and Recommendations for Use:

This site is basically a place to find ideas from other teachers who are on the same plight as you.  I enjoyed the “chalkdust” section a lot.  Some of the posts were about conferences, discipline experiences, and lesson ideas that were really helpful.  Other posts were just entertaining stories from different teachers’ days.  I think it builds a sense of community and can relieve stress just by helping teachers to remember that they are not the only ones out there.

The lesson plans and resources would also be a section I would frequent to find different activities.  As I mentioned above, the only disadvantage is that you have to search to find activities for the appropriate grade levels.  Still, the categories and subcategories make it easy to really narrow in on finding ideas for a specific learning objective.