Interested in writing an article for the site?
March 6, 2022
It's March, which means graduation season is nearly here! I always remember my classes tapering off around this season as students spend their classes preparing for tests or the graduation-related events.
If you've got time to spare and are interested in writing something that can help other teachers, perhaps you may be interested in writing an article or two for ALTopedia.
I mentioned it in the end-of-the-year post last December, but one of the systems I've been working on is a way for users to post longer articles on topics of interest to other English teachers. It uses a more advanced text editor than the activity form and lets you attach images inline in the article text.
My goal for the article system is to provide teachers, especially new teachers, with a wide variety of practical advice, lessons learned through personal experience, and ideas for how to succeed in class. Ideally, a given article should relevant and useful over the next few years.
At least in the beginning, I'm going to put up a bit of a barrier of entry to try and set a high standard from the start. I look at a lot of the more beloved activities here and they're clearly the result of a lot of love and care.
Therefore, I'm going to ask anyone who wants to write an article to send me an e-mail with a quick proposal for what you plan on writing, along with your ALTopedia account name. If it sounds good, I'll give your account the ability to post articles and you can get started. Here are some initial guidelines I'd like to set:
Is the topic relevant to a wide variety of teachers? Does it use terminology that can be understood by people who are new to the job?
Do you have some degree of expertise in the subject? Can you talk about it in a way that someone who may disagree with you would still think that you argued your point well?
Could it spark an interesting discussion among the other users of the site? Does it have enough depth that the reader might benefit from hearing various points of view among the site's users?
Can you write at a reasonably adult level (punctuation and capitalization are a must!) and write to an appropriate length? There's no minimum or maximum word count, but a post that's too short may not have much for a reader to grab onto, and a most readers won't finish a post that's too long.
If those conditions sound fine to you and you'd like to write something, then please get in touch with me at my new e-mail address jake (at) eigonexus.com and let me know! I'm hoping to launch this section in the spring with a batch of strong, thought-provoking articles that can help new teachers especially.
Also, this is a completely unrelated topic, but I've got some other changes coming to the site in the spring and I want to give warning: the site will no longer support Internet Explorer in April! I've certainly had to make do with some ancient teacher room computers in my day, but there are some advancements to the site interface that I can't make while still supporting IE. If the system you're using has anything else - Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Lynx - please use it for ALTopedia if at all possible!
Good luck with the end of the year!