If you are planning to use the internet regularly with a class it is worthwhile spending some time on raising awareness of the internet and how it works among students. Most will be aware of the internet, but a clarification of what it is, what it can do is always useful. The following task is a brief off-line introduction to the internet and commonly used terms which are often not completely understood.

Students who have used the internet before could explain what they have done orally or through writing to those who have not. Students who have not could prepare questions to ask those who have. All students could prepare a brief survey about the internet, what other students know, would like to use it for etc.

While many families and students are beginning to explore the internet access is still not widespread and many students will have little or no experience of surfing the internet. This, if combined with a lack of computer skills in general, can create problems; indeed there is nothing more frustrating for students than watching others have fun while they cannot participate. It is worthwhile spending some time initially to help students develop the basic skills necessary to use internet effectively: one of the things students find most difficult is typing an address correctly which is of course fundamental to any internet surfing!

- Can you find where you type an address in the box at the top of the screen?

Click once in the box and use the delete button to delete the existing address.

Even though it may be a language class it may be worthwhile allowing students to the above exercise with pages in Spanish and indeed spend some time exploring the web in Spanish as long as they do not come to identify their internet based English classes with uncontrolled surfing in Spanish! For further surfing skills practice students could be encouraged to select a home page and write some basic questions for a group at another computer about this site. Those who have more experience with computers can help those who are new to them but sometimes this means taking over rather than sharing!

Be it famous people, sport, places, course books tend to organise their material around themes and the internet provides a simple way of bringing these themes up to date and making them real rather than the static presentations often found in books. A simple search on the internet will find material connected to any subject presented in a course book and a few minutes work by the teacher will produce a worksheet or lesson plan for the relevant level. Here is a simple example for lower levels related to food, a typical theme in textbooks. The task is very controlled and quite short so that even though students are dealing with a genuine English text what is expected of them is quite simple both in terms of language and internet skills. Teachers can easily devise similar tasks for any subject area.

Linking internet activities to the students book also provided a means of incorporating internet into normal classes so that time on the computer does not become a disjointed experience. Most internet based activities allow for pre-computer and post-computer activities: prediction of what they will find, vocabulary, questions they would like answered, feedback to other groups, writing up results etc all provide lots of opportunities for general skills practice in class based around internet based material.

With higher levels it is of course possible to produce more general and freer activities although it has to be remembered that even at higher levels, short controlled exercises are best until students develop the internet skills to deal with more demanding tasks. Note taking is particularly demanding as it requires students to identify key information and to summarise it: an area students often need more help with. The following worksheet is an example of a more general worksheet for students who are comfortable using internet.

Any kind of note taking or freer activity provides lots of opportunities for feedback in class afterwards in pairs, groups or the whole class together either orally or written. This, combined with the extension of the course book theme to the real life world of internet, makes lessons more realistic and varied while incorporating computer work into normal classes rather than isolating it as an isolated activity.

As students become more familiar with the internet they may want to experiment with taking information, text or pictures from web pages and either printing it for later use or importing it into a word processor. The following worksheet can be applied to any material on the internet as it simply illustrates how text (or images) can be copied from the internet and later pasted and manipulated in a word processor or other program.

The skills developed in the above exercise can be used to create any number of worksheets for other groups. Text can be copied off the net, used as a gap fill, used as a text for comprehension questions, used even to examine the grammar in it. Cutting and pasting can also be a teacher’s best friend and the source of lots of worksheets for use in class even if it is the teacher alone who has access to the internet.

As students become more skilled with their use of internet there are more opportunities to move from structured teacher-generated worksheets to freer student led activities. This may require students to find information that interests them personally and they therefore have to develop the skills to search for information on the internet. The following worksheet provides an introduction to effective searching skills on the web.

For students of lower levels or who might find the above exercise difficult it might be an idea to allow them to use a Spanish search engine or to search an English search engine for Spanish terms: what is important at this initial stage is to develop the students IT skills so that they will not prove an impediment to developing their English through the internet later.

Once they have some initial searching skills the following activities will develop the skills further and provide a bit of fun.

Students should be able to develop their own quizzes or treasure hunts quite easily.

One of the key functions of the internet is that of providing genuine language exposure which in turn provides a stimulus: this is the real world and not just an exercise in a textbook. The following task is an illustration of how ten to twenty minutes internet exposure forms the basis for a narrative writing class: inspired by their internet contact, a real task, students frequently concentrate and work much better on this task than they do in a normal writing class.

Again, this kind of activity allows for later oral practice in class as students re-tell their stories etc. They could also write the stories in class or for homework and then re-write them in a process writing type activity.

Once students are comfortable with the internet technically and have become used to achieving specific tasks while dealing with genuine English teachers might wish to consider more demanding project work. The following ideas are related to cinema but virtually any subject of interest to the students from pop stars to sport to food to places to visit could be used in a similar way.

Project work can take as much time and involve as many skills as the teacher feels appropriate. Ultimately, it can also be linked to publishing on the internet (in a later section).

- Find number 73 which is all about sending email and answer the questions.

- What is an email?

- What is the difference between a normal letter and an email?

- Why are CAPITAL LETTERS not always a good idea?

- What are attachments?

- What do these symbols mean?

I-0 ;-) :-X

- send an email message to the editor of this magazine.

Students might want to practice some of the symbols by writing in class; they could even write messages entirely by symbols and invent their own. They could also explore possible differences between writing letters and emails by writing a letter and them changing it to an email format or visa versa. If students have experience of emailing or chat in Spanish they could discuss these or write questionnaires about it for other students to find out their experiences.

Once students have an email address they can explore using it to access chat or pen friend sites. The success of these depends on many factors from who is in the chat room at any one time to whether or not a pen friend responds and whether or not a student keeps the contact going.

The teacher may wish to leave this kind activity as a free one to the students or organise a more controlled scheme by contacting a teacher or group of students in another school or country. As always, individual or group student activity on the computer allows for many opportunities for feedback and skills practice in normal class time.

Publishing student material is a logical extension of project work and also a means of establishing contact with other schools. It does however mean you have to get involved with designing web pages and also in finding a server to store them (some schools already have their own web site and it is easy for students to keep their pages on this site). Here are just two examples of the hundreds of students who already have material on the web.

The extension possibilities for this type of project are enormous although so too are some of the technical restrictions and demands on time.

With faster connections using more than simply text based material on the www is becoming more realistic. This has the advantage of being more attractive for students as they manipulate images, listen and/or watch videos. The combination of multimedia features may also aid overall comprehension as students combine sound, text and visual stimulus to build up an overall picture. The following site contains a number of lessons and sites which use multimedia to some extent. The site also has built in TIPS, pages which guide students through effective exploration and use of multimedia on the Internet.

Online resources:

contains numerous links to sites of interest, both for personal use and for potential use in class.