Last week, I wrote my New Years Teaching Resolutions. One of them was to “share my lesson plans with other teachers in a consistent and organized way.”  There are so many ways to share links and drinks, but what about our favorite worksheets? Mine usually stay hidden away somewhere on my computer or worse yet in a file cabinet in my office. I hate the idea that I spend hours creating handouts for my class and they rarely get used again. Sometimes, I give them to other teachers. Most of the time, we share hard copies, which is such a pain if you want to edit something.

So this year, my goal is to share more and share better. I want to share the electronic copies of all of my lessons. I have a few ideas of how to go about it. I could start putting them all on my personal website. I could use another website. Something with a community feature would be great so that I can easily get lessons too.

So far, I have two ideas: connexions, or a wiki. The first is something I stumbled upon today, but it might be worth looking into. Wikis, on the other hand, I am familiar with. I have used a wiki to share lessons before. Last time, I used a wiki to share pronunciation lessons with other interested parties. People shared things, but they rarely posted lessons. So I am going to have to give the first one a try and maybe look for something better. Do you have any ideas?

ESL students spend a lot of time online and it can be a great opportunity for them to meet native English speakers. I mean, 85% of American college students are on Facebook and the majority are active members. Our ESL/EFL students could be meeting a lot of Americans online.

But more than the obvious social benefits, social networking can improve students’ English. Just look around English, baby! and you can see how social networking lets learners experiment with language in a friendly, communicative setting. Still, not many people are convinced that social networking can or should be integrated into the classroom. It’s a nice extracurricular activity, but most teachers can’t see the teaching potential.

Well, the truth is social networking is great reading and writing practice! And I am going to take advantage of that in my ESL class. I am integrating social networking sites into a reading strategies lesson. One important reading strategy is inference. Inference means interpreting beyond what is actually written and making bigger conclusions. Look around any social networking site and you’ll find there is a lot to infer. People say one thing, but they mean another. My students are going to use this handout that I found online. The handout wasn’t developed to be used with social networking profiles, but it helps students separate what people say from what they mean. And it seems to fit perfectly with the activity. Students will write a few quotes from a profile and say what they think they mean on the handout. Then, they will write a paragraph about what they think about the person.

Here is an example of inference from lastbreath. His profile was the first one I read today. He says, “Things I Like: romantic dinner” He means, “I like romance. I want romance.” He says, “Favorite Movie: romantic and romantic comedy” He means, “I am a good boyfriend and I really want romance ,” and maybe, “I want a girlfriend.” You could even infer things from his screen name.

The point is that as teachers we need to monopolize on our students’ free time. They spend a lot of time online and an English social networking site will really help their English. It will improve their reading skills and maybe it will make it easier for them to make inferences.

This is just one idea. And we need to think of more ideas because online social networking is a great way for ESL students to practice reading and writing.