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Make suggestions, report errors > Extremely dissapointed with eslprintables.com
Extremely dissapointed with eslprintables.com
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1chapelcredit
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Extremely dissapointed with eslprintables.com
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I just want to use this as a medium for expressing my disappointment and frustration with this site. I am a medical student from Colorado, volunteering at a small rural hospital in East Africa this summer. I was asked when I arrived to teach an ESL class for the hospital staff, but I have never taught English before and have no resources of my own. I have been putting together lessons from whatever I could find, and was thrilled when I found this site. I though that this would be an answer to my problems and could really help me to leave this hospital and community better than I found it.
Then I found out how the website works. After trying to download a couple of worksheets, I was redirected to a page informing me that I must first register. This is normal, I thought, and so I went ahead and registered. After registering I was informed that I had to download a browser toolbar in order to activate my account. I don �t even use the toolbars that can actually be useful, like those provided by google and firefox, so I certainly was not about to download some proprietary toolbar from an ESL website to clutter up my browser. After a few hours I recanted, as I don �t use internet explorer anyway, and as I could always uninstall later.
After installing the toolbar and activating my account, I began browsing for worksheets and flashcards, and soon found several that could actually prove very helpful. I trid to download the first one and, much to my surprise, was redirected again! This time I was informed that I could not download any materials until I had first uploaded my own, and those had been downloaded by other users (which must have presented some serious difficulties for the very first users of the site!). At this point I had already registered, provided personal information and my e-mail address, and downloaded useless proprietary software to gain access to these materials, and now I was being told, in effect, that I first had to make my own materials, put them on the site and wait for others to stumble across them. That is unacceptable.
As I have said, I am not an ESL teacher and do not have my materials to upload. I completely understand the account registration requirement, and I can understand not allowing people to download as much as they would like without contributing (the toolbar is completely unnecessary and, if you ask me, the type of thing that only sounds like a good idea in some sort of small committee meeting). But if you want to stop abuse of the resources the way to do that is to set a download cap, maybe 10 to 15 downloads if you want to be really stringent about it, after which you must upload your own resources. That would be a perfectly fine solution; but to not allow someone to use the materials on this site at all unless they are themselves essentially professional ESL instructors is, in my opinion, absurd.
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25 Jun 2009
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domnitza
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Hi!
I understand your frustration. But I do not agree with you. There was a first time for every member of this community. The spirit of eslprintables is TO SHARE; upload in order to download. I am not an English teacher (I teach French actually) but as a teacher I recognize the importance of establishing some rules in the first place. These rules must be applied to everybody. Not all the members here are professional ESL instructors as you say. Some of them just like English and teaching children.
There are so many site providing English worksheets, printables, handouts and games. For free, without any rules. You choose. But none of them has the spirit eslprintables.com has brought into our lives.
Domnitza |
25 Jun 2009
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Olindalima ( F )
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Hi,
This site has a webmaster; he sets the rules. The rules have proved to work for people from around the whole planet, it doesn �t matter whether one �s native language is the English one or not. Here, you can find people from every country in Europe, in South America, Canada, North African countries and ... from the USA, and others, many others, obviously.
When we first arrive to a new site, my opinion, we should read the rules, just to know what kind of place is the one where we are.
This is the introduction of this website, right in the beginning of the home page:
What �s this
Register
Send us a printable
Links
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What is t |
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Hello, my name is V�ctor Gayol.
I am an English Language
teacher in Spain. I �ve created this website with the objective of providing a
large database of ESL printables, where you can find quickly and easily what you
need for your lessons.
I think that we can achieve this goal with the cooperation among teachers. For
this reason I �ve created a system where the more you contribute the more you can
get.
Only registered users can get full access to downloads. After registering you have to send us one of your own printables.
Every time someone downloads one of your worksheets, you get one point, which
will be added to your account.
For example, if you have 12 points, you can make 12 downloads from the site.
When you reach 30 points, you become a premium user. Premium users are allowed
to download 30 of the daily recent contributions for free.
You are only allowed to send your own documents. If you send a copy taken from
another website or scanned from a book, you will lose your account.
Nowadays, there are two new contents that we
can share: powerpoint presentations and online exercises.
I hope you find the website
useful.
Thanks for your
cooperation.
V�ctor Gayol |
As you can see, everything here is clear as water, pity some now and then some people show up, trying to make this site the one they just needed, without having set a word to figure it out.
This is the site Victor created and all of us, members of this site, are very happy with it and everyday many of us, thank Victor and thank all the community for the privilege of having such a place of work and sharing our work, our doubts, our opinions and ask for help in the most different aspects of teaching.
If you are not a teacher ( as you say ) you probably shouldn �t have accepted to teach an ESL class for the hospital staff - teaching is not giving information, it is much more than that. Teachers usually don �t begin their work with some kind of printables they get here or there. They begin with a curriculum, which kind of vocabulary will be necessary, which grammar structures, which linguistics functions, at what level, what kind of strategies, which kind of resources, bla, bla, bla.
Anyway, just to prove you we are a very strict but very, very friendly "family", let me tell you one thing you can do: Look for what you need here, email those teachers and explain them who you are and what you need and........ I AM SURE, they will, gladly, send you the materials you need.
All the best in your professional life
Regards
olindalima
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25 Jun 2009
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anitarobi
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Welcome to ESL Printables, the website where English Language teachers exchange resources: worksheets, lesson plans, activities, etc.
Our collection is growing every day with the help of many teachers. If you want to download you have to send your own contributions.
PS: If you had taken the time to turn the text you posted here into a word doc with fill-in the blanks task, we could already have downloaded it, you would have gotten your points, and you could now bask in the sunlight of SHARING. There �s still time... |
25 Jun 2009
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Akanah
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Welcome to ESL Printables, the website where English Language teachers exchange resources: worksheets, lesson plans, activities, etc.
Our collection is growing every day with the help of many teachers. If you want to download you have to send your own contributions.
You should have read this. It �s the first thing you see when you open the ESLprintables site.
If you need exercises but you don �t want to share your own work, just google "english exercises", you �ll find lots of pages. |
25 Jun 2009
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1chapelcredit
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Domnitza,
Thank you for your reply. I looked through the forum before I posted my comments, and I can see that many people feel very much as you do; that this site is more than just a resource page for them, and is in fact a community. I think that �s great, really.
But the point is that this community is unnecessarily difficult to become a part of, and is especially restrictive of those who would like to use the materials shared on this site in order to teach English within a few days, or theoretically weeks, of discovering them in the first place. I have taught also, and certainly understand the need for rules; but I also understand that those rules must be created in a way that is reasonable and can be applied fairly to persons in many different situations.
As for your saying that the spirit of the site is "TO SHARE," I could not agree more that this should be the spirit of such a site. However, I believe we may be focusing on different defintions. The word "share," in the context you have used it, could mean either "to allow someone to use or enjoy something that one possesses," or "to use or enjoy something jointly or in turns." The fact that you clarify your usage of the word with the idea "upload in order to download" shows me that you are honing in more on the second definition. I believet that both definitions of the word are appropriate and applicable, and most must be accounted for within the concept of sharing; but never when teaching children to "share" do we teach them that someone must first share what they have with you before you ought to share with them. That is not the concept of sharing, that is the concept of reciprocity.
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25 Jun 2009
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ignis.fatuus
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sorry , but the rules are clearly explained and you should have read them before you registered. simple as that. in my opinion the rules are fair and i totally agree with Domnitza, you choose.
Martyna |
25 Jun 2009
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johanne23232
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I can assure you that your first impressions are mistaken; first of all you don �t HAVE to download the toolbar, I have been a member for many months and don �t have it as I hate toolbars of any sort.
SEcondly, if you do (and I hope you do!) upload even just one interesting worksheet here (and as someone suggested, it could be a text with questions.. whatever) that might lead you to become a premium member just by itself if 30 people download it, and you would then be able to download thousands of worksheets, for the rest of your life!!! It �s an amazingly generous site and I assure you that if you gave it a chance your cup would really overflow with wonderful resources.
It �s true, there are many other sites where you might be able to download without uploading, I �m not sure.......but this site in no way makes false promises.
On a different note, if there is something I can help you with personally for your first days of teaching, until you are able to upload stuff of your own, I would be happy to help with tips or some of my own work. Good luck in your new job!
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25 Jun 2009
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1chapelcredit
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Again, I appreciate the comments, and also how defensive everyone seems to be about this site. It is obvious that you are love it very much. Anat, thank you especially for providing the links to the other ESL sites, and thank all of you who have messaged me privately to freely offer your own resources; I do appreciate it and will certainly take you up on it.
Anitarobi brings up an interesting point that I neglected to mention in my initial posting, though I certainly thought of delving into it. If I do not have any resources of my own to share, have nto taught ESL before and thus do not yet know what sort of resources would be helpful, and need to gain some materials in a relatively short time, and if for some reason I am set on using this site, I am really only left with a few options, aren �t I? I could either quickly go and steal some resources from somewhere else online (an option I am sure there are policies about somewhere on this site). or I could do as Anitarobi suggests and take my comments above, delete some vocabulary words and post that as a "worksheet": essentially creating sub-par and useless resources that would flood the website with worthless printables. I ask you, which of these options is better? I have in fact created many of my own resources (for lack of other options), but of the ones that might actually be useful to someone else, there already exist multiple and better made versions on this site and others.
As for Olindalima �s comments that I should not be teaching ESL in the first placce, first of all I never said that I was not a teacher, only that I have not taught English before. If you would like for me to upload original resources for the teaching of physics, chemistry, physical science or drama, I have plenty. You are correct, though; I do not have a curriculum, I do not have much of a plan, and I certainly don �t have any experience to use in this process. You are from Portugal, yes? (the flag avatar is not the best, but I am guessing). I challenge you to go volunteer to fix computers and work in the clinic of some rural community somewhere, as the only native Portugese speaker to have visited in over a year, and when they tell you that what they really want, desperately, is to learn Portugese, to tell them that you are sorry, but you really aren �t prepare and haven �t done it before. As somebody with years of experience just speaking, reading and writing in that language, you will have an infinitely greater knowledge base from which to teach than anyone else the village is likely to have access to at any point in the near future.
And finally, all those who posted the header and the fine print are correct; I absolutely, unquestionably failed to notice the bit in the intro about having to upload before you are allowed to download. Called it a positive thinking bias if you want, but such a concept completely defies my expectations and I didn �t even consider looking for it. Then again, when was the last time you went to a new website with resources you needed, and read the "about" page before you signed up?
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25 Jun 2009
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Sylwia G
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i think chapelcredit has a point, there should be a kind of download cap, at least 5 downloads, just to give new members a chance to get familiarized with the idea of the site. chapelcredit, if you need anything concerning your teaching, i would be glad to help you.
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25 Jun 2009
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