Some Housekeeping Announcements

I'm going to slightly change the way I post about some things, and just thought I'd make a quick announcement here.  (Yes, this is another one of my "blogging about blogging" posts.  Feel free to skip this one if you're not interested.)

On February 29, 2016 I started posting all of my TESOL materials that were specifically to supplement specific textbooks.  Before that (from November 29, 2013 to February 29, 2016) I had only been posting TESOL materials that I thought were of general use.  

(Actually all of my materials are used as supplements for textbooks, since TESOL is currently in an era where textbooks dominate the curriculum.  But I had made a distinction between, say, a worksheet on Forming Negative Adjectives which may have been made with one textbook in mind, but could potentially be used independently, and a list of supplemental reading questions which could only be useful if you are doing the reading lesson from Impact 3 Unit 1.)

Since I started posting all my supplemental material for specific textbooks onto this blog, TESOL related posts have completely taken over this blog.  For better and for worse.  On the one hand, almost none of my old school friends read this blog anymore, and I suspect the major reason for that is the fact that TESOL related materials have completely taken over this blog.  (Well, that and the fact that nobody reads blogs anymore in 2023).  But on the other hand, I know that a number of teachers from around the world have found those materials to be useful.  (Ever since the security update, I've been getting requests to access Google Drive Folders from all over the world.  As annoying as that is, it is a nice indication that people are finding my stuff useful.)  And that's what it's all about, isn't?  Trying to create some value in this world by being useful to our fellow human beings.

But I'm going to change the way I post these materials.

Instead of creating separate blog posts for every page of the textbook, as I used to do (e.g. English World 2: Unit 3 p.47 Writing) and then linking them back to the index (e.g. English World 2 Index), I'm just going to link all of my materials directly from the index, and not do separate blog posts for individual pages anymore.

I think that will be beneficial for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it will be one-stop shopping for visitors to this blog.  A teacher who is interested in extra materials for English World 2, for instance, is not going to interested in clicking through a lot of different posts.  They'll want everything all in one place.

Secondly, it will cut down on the amount of clutter on the front page of this blog.  (No one except fellow teachers are going to be interested in my materials for English World 2.)

And thirdly, it will (hopefully) save me time on going back and updating all my links in the indexes.  (I would be ashamed, dear reader, to admit to you how much of my life I've spent over the years going back and updating links in my indexes.)

General TESOL materials I'll still create separate posts for.  But Google Docs that are only useful for supplementing specific textbooks will not get their own posts going forward--I'll just link to the Google Doc from the index instead.

Also, I'm going to start posting the indexes on the front page of this blog, instead of burying them in the back.

In the past I have backdated all my indexes to September 2003.  

October 14, 2003 is when I started this blog, so one month previous seemed like a good place to hide all the clutter.

If you're not familiar with blogger functionality, blogger allows you to choose the date that you want your blogpost to be published on.  The default setting is always "now", but you can changed the time, day, month or year if you want something to appear in your blog earlier.

It's very handy when you want to hide something away from your front page, but it also could be confusing to readers.  And maybe even potentially dishonest.

To make the timeline of everything more transparent, I'm just going to start posting indexes on the front page of this blog as I create them.  After all, this blog is so cluttered with all of my various projects, why start worrying about the indexes creating extra clutter.

(Actually, regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I've already been doing this for several months now.  Starting in October of last year, I've just been posting my new indexes on the front page of this blog--see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.  So I guess this is just an acknowledgement and explanation of what I've already started doing.)