Learning how to teach English was difficult for me. And it was partly those difficulties that I had that made me start ESLinsider.
ESLinsider started with videos and those videos were inspired from a lot of wasted hours looking for stuff that worked online.
Here's a video where I explain partly why I created ESLinsider and the value of the how-to videos.
Transcription:
Hi, this is Ian and I wanted to show you a little bit why I made ESLinsider. So for me in the beginning teaching English was pretty difficult. And one of the reasons why I found it difficult was that it was difficult to find stuff online that worked in my classes stuff that was just easy to absorb.
One of the sites that I used to use was Dave's ESLcafe.com. It's a good site. You can find a lot of forums here and you can find a job here teaching in different countries. It's a large site.
Yet so I'd come here when I needed like an activity for my class and look. If you look here these are all just a list. It's a really really really long list. It doesn't really tell you much about the game as they're not really organized in any way.
So then you click on one and try to read the text there and figure it out. You need games for a specific purpose that's what you need. Soon I am going to show you what I mean by that.
The other thing you can do is read books. If you are someone who learns easily by reading then yeah go right ahead. But there's not much context in books. A book or text by itself is a little boring so that is one of the reasons why I started to create ESLinsider.
So if you look here at this page that I am looking at right now, you can see all these videos are organized. This makes it a lot easier. So when you click on one of these categories such as "icebreakers and warm-up activities" You'll find a list of activities that are organized by whether they are going to work with adults or children or by their level.
Here's a game that I'll show you, so you can come over here and it's a lot easier. It's a lot easier because with the video you can see right in the classroom and see what's going on.
The scene that you just saw was from a buxiban in Taiwan. It's basically a private after school institution. So yes I just wanted to show you that these videos make teaching easier because you can see right into the classroom.
Also there is a lot of context there. If you are going to teach in eastern Asia then you probably will end up in an environment like that.
Video is great, but sometimes you may prefer text so here I try to make it as simple as possible. I'll either lay out the instructions in a bulleted list or in a numbered list.
That makes them very easy to comprehend. You have the video and you have simple instructions that are in text too.