MIDTESOL Matters
Fall 2004

 

CAUGHT BY MY OWN WEB

By William R. Eubank

 

Since1995, I have promoted the use of the World Wide Web in education. In that year I took a leave of absence from an ESL teaching position with the Arlington Public School District in Texas to care for my elderly, handicapped parent in Raytown, Missouri. The planned year‘s leave morphed into eight years of in-home eldercare along with some very intense work with computers. My self-education process included the building of several hundred websites on the World Wide Web, developing CDs , and making some thirty presentations at educational conferences in Texas, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska.

 

Much of my work involved doing volunteer web sites for www.VarietyKC.org, www.Rite-Teacher.com, and www.MIDTESOL.org. A website is powerful, inexpensive and effective communications tool given unique content, updating, and length of time on the Internet.

 

The number of “unique computers” accessing the MIDTESOL site is now close to 100,000 a year, while our membership is just above 400.  If you have something to say to the ESL world, consider having it published in MIDTESOL Matters (circulation 450) and subsequently on the World Wide Web. Be bold – you are a teacher – teach others about your teaching!

 

During the last ten years, I used my own family website as a place to experiment with .html and to report on some of my educational experiences, including a number of pages about teaching in the People’s Republic of China (www.EubankWeb.com/William/China). In October of 2003, one of my pages about the money system in China attracted the attention of a veteran of four teaching stints to China. This initial contact led to a blizzard of emails during the winter of 2003 (up to ten each day), phone contact with the New Year, and a face-to-face meeting after her return from her fifth trip to China in July of 2004.

 

Katie and I spent the month of August traveling through Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Missouri – visiting with more than 50 of my relatives at a family reunion and seeing her relatives in the area. I then spent 23 days in September in East Lansing,Michigan meeting her family and friends.

 

The web is powerful. Katie and I will marry in October before the MIDTESOL conference. Plan to make a presentation at the next conference and send in your articles – no telling what you might catch.

 

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