If you asked me which website I'd recommend to any new teacher colleague, my first pick would be FutureLearn. Here's why.
FutureLearn Online Courses (Also for Teachers)
After fifteen years of attending conferences and annual meetings, I'd had enough of sitting through introductions to the CEFR levels, CLIL debates and exam overviews. Every teacher needs to keep improving and updating their knowledge regularly, but ideally without cancelling lessons or sitting through hours of dry, unengaging presentations. So I turned to good old Google and found the first course offered by the British Council through FutureLearn: English in Early Childhood: Language Learning and Development. I was able to enrol on this six-week course for free. New materials were published every Monday, with a reminder sent to my inbox. It required about two hours a week — watching videos, reading articles, and working through the exercises — and, given that I was running an innovative English home-nursery with my two toddlers at the time, the course suited my needs perfectly. I could complete the tasks whenever I had a spare hour, with no fixed appointments to keep. I also had the option to connect with other colleagues interested in the same topic, or simply to work through it on my own without becoming part of the wider "community".
It wasn't long before I signed up for the next course: Teaching English Online, an extremely useful course offered by Cambridge Assessment English on FutureLearn, and perfectly timed for lockdown.
And these are just two of my favourite courses — you can find courses on nearly anything on the website.
These online courses are a genuinely useful, quick way to get up to date on current topics in our field, sharpen your skills, discover new materials and websites, and reflect on wider professional questions. Trying is believing.
Find some ESL exercises specifically designed for online lessons HERE.