IN THE BEGINNING

Hello from me Lorraine currently a student at SRC Armagh taking BTEC level 2 web development with "Employ me" course funded by the EEC and designed to helping people like myself acquire new skills or expand existing skills with a view to gaining employment. Because I recently moved back to Northern Ireland after having lived and worked abroad, I am grateful for this course to give me new skills at this time and keep me in touch with learning and meeting new people. This is my blog created at the beginning  of the BTEC Level 2 Web development course. I chose this course because as an English teacher I want to expand my teaching options to include Web development and IT.

I am already familiar with building websites using website builders that do not require the user to write html code, such as WIX.com, Weebly.com, and even Blogger and WordPress, so I hope this course will enable me to expand my knowledge of creating html and dream weaver, and how these options work verses the site builders that do not require code. I hope also to obtain an initial qualification in this area of study.

I have decided to use this web development opportunity at SRC to create a free service for ESOL teachers. There are many web sites that provide free work sheets but I hope my site will be a little different in so much as it will contain my original worksheets and presentations.

I do have a vast portfolio of materials on my hard drive but its a little cumbersome to remember and recall them all at a minutes notice, so this site will serve me as well as other teachers.

I created a blog in 2010 EFL-Lorraine.com to record my ideas, activities and planning. The blog is quite successful and some months I reach 20,000 hits a month. This blog has a description of activities and its a bit time consuming for any teacher in a rush. That is why I decided to create a blog with just materials.

I do tend to be a bit fancy on web sites but I decided to keep this one simple and to the point so that it may be easily navigated. Ideally a teacher should be able to get in and out quickly and download any material they find relevant.

I would like to include on the site a database of digital sites that are useful in teaching but I am not sure if I will have time.