The Englipedia Archive

March 10th edit:

Howdy, folks! This post is now a little out of date but I thought I'd just edit it instead of making a new one. The Englipedia archival process appears to have worked, so now we're going to start incorporating Englipedia activities into ALTopedia! You can check them out at the Englipedia Archive user page or just encounter them as you browse around the site. In the end, I pulled out 1143 activities in total, and we'll have to go into all of them to clean up formatting, fix typos, and make sure the automated process didn't miss anything. We'll trickle out a handful of them every day or so to keep things manageable, but there should be plenty in time for the new school year in April!

Original post:

If you're visiting the site, you're probably familiar with Englipedia, ALTopedia's predecessor. Al, one of our admins, was running the site during its last days. The platform it was running on was getting shut down and the tech behind the site was getting too difficult to use, which is why we started up ALTopedia. An archived version of the site has been online for the last year, but being a large web site, it costs money to host as well as time to address technical issues.

Even in archived form, a lot of people told us it was still valuable to them due to the sheer amount of resources on the site. There's over a thousand different activities organized by grammar point and school level. The site represented years of hard work and the collaborative effort of dozens of teachers.

In my (quite biased!) opinion, ALTopedia is more technically advanced as a web site and makes it much easier for teachers to find and especially post their own activities. I've added a lot of features since the site first went up about a year ago, and I've got a ton of things to work on in the future. We're hosting almost 200 activities right now, which is awesome! But it's still not Englipedia-sized.

The best of both worlds, then, would be to have Englipedia's wealth of activities with a more modern web site underneath. So over the last month or two, I've been working on a conversion process to take Englipedia activities and turn them into ALTopedia activities, with all of the benefits they bring - tags, the ability to edit them, and consistent formatting. I've been testing out and the process is mostly ready to start, but I wanted to ask for everyone's help first.