I work at ELLS, Adelaide Institute, Co-ordinating the General English Program through its peaks and troughs (currently in a trough - with only two day classes and two evening classes and two vocationally focussed classes), for 14 hours a week and spend 6 hours a week working on the ESL Online Project as a instructional developer (which means that someone else writes the material and I turn it into something that is interactive and hopefully interesting and exciting for the student to use as part of their online learning. I'm working on the writing modules that are being put online for the Certificate in Advanced English for Proficiency, with Wendy Sadler as my writer, and director. :) All of the above changes from this week, when my 14 hours relocates into the Study Centre at the Renaissance Centre for 4 weeks, and then I relocate for the final two weeks of term to teach the English for Skilled Employment class. Therefore I am the ultimate flexible, adaptable ESL teacher!! However, I have been using the Internet with students in a fairly adhoc (let's learn this together kind of environment) since the beginning of the year. I have taken 1- students through an introduction to the internet in 3 hours, which introduced them to finger pointing and blue text that becomes purple prose(!!) when you have visited it, and simple searching for things in Australia, and then showed them how to find newspapers from their country. They were totally engrossed and were able to follow the instructions quite easily, to the extent that no-one took a coffee break and the instructor was the one that needed the coffee and the chair at the end of 3 hours. The energy level was still very high at the end of the session, but I feel that this may have been exceptional. As for Email and ESL Talk, I have been using both with a 1+ and above group in the evening and a 2 and above group in the day. They are linked in to Hotmail which means they can receive email from all over. The rule is they can read all their mail, write one message only in their own language (restricted to roman script languages only) and write as many messages as they like in English. Some spend all the time (2 hours) writing emails, while others spend some time writing email, and some time browsing the web, usually to read newspapers from their country in English. Others have enjoyed using the chat room where the conversation exists on two completely different levels and usually unrelated, one that is being written and the other verbal. It would be interesting to do a study of the language, by taping the audio and printing off the written and look at how we can operate on different levels, in different registers, using different genres at the same time. Others like the quizzes and the links to other ESL sites, while others like to explore the internet sites that can be accessed from ESL Talk. The great beauty of this is everyone can work independently on what they like, and not be locked in to what the whole class is doing. The best thing I've found though is that it's a great way to get evening students writing, when usually they complain that they are too tired, and ask to do it at home which often means it doesn't get done. But as they are sending emails to friends they are also able to send me a copy, and as they are working I'm able to correct their mistakes and email it back so that they can see immediately where they have problems. (This doesn't work if you have ten or more send you emails at the same time!) Some students however, are not interested in computing at all, so I've found that I need to be careful that they are not excluded from the class.