ESL Journal

It is easy to create an ESL Journal system for your own school. All you need is a web browser to get started.

You can publish your journal under your own domain or your school's domain, or you can share our domain as my.esljournal.org/(yourname) as you wish.

The basic system contains

an automated home page that you cannot damage; it pulls content from "inside" the site and displays previews with links to the source material
a web log; you can limit the weblog to the teacher(s) or open it to student posting
a discussion forum; blog topics can be linked to the forum to enable critical peer review of student writing
an image gallery to store photos you can post around the site (the blog has its own image management
our member management and social networking tools that let students post brief text, links and images
peer to peer private messaging
additional, optional media features

All technical support is provided by ESLjournal.org, and creative or instructional support is available at reasonable rates. Your school's web servers incur no additional load, and no new hardware, software or labor is required.

Your Own ESL Website

You'll have an "editing suite" that lets you add and maintain your student list and your article archive via your browser. No esoteric skills are required. You got here; you can do it.

You will also have the option to turn on a calendar, guest book, photo album(s), and other features characteristic of high-quality sites. This provides additional interactiveness.

The entire robust and proven system is hosted independently of your computer platform and works in most browsers.

Content Management

Students will add content through simple forms using any modern web browser. Instruction in use of the system takes only a few minutes.

First you or your student will sign into the system. To create an article, you simply type - copy and paste raw text - content into a form, add a title and synopsis, plus the author's name and click a button. You and your students may optionally add a photo or other (jpeg) image and a link to related content to each article.

Development

Development time for your classroom journal is typically under a week depending on current workload. Technical support is available by email and by instant messaging during regular business hours (US Pacific time). Creative support for more elaborate graphics, etc., is available for competitive fees, but a more common scenario is to have such enhancements added locally by your own talented staff. Instructions and a tutorial are built into the system.

Pricing

How much? Not much, maybe free if you go find sponsors. (Fees)

ESL Journal Site Fees

The basic fee per classroom journal is $49.95 monthly or $495 prepaid annually, plus $3 per month for each user from your institution. There is a setup and training fee of $495, which may be waived in lieu of prepayment of one year's monthly fees. Finally there is a $1 monthly service charge per student record if archives are to be retained after 90 days of inactivity.

If service is interrupted for thirty days or more due to nonpayment, a restart fee of $295 applies. (Trying to skimp on semester breaks is not worth the effort for either of us.)

The fees include

implementation and a brief online training course for you or your editor
generous archive and bandwidth allowance. (Storage and bandwidth charges may apply to sites with
archives or traffic exceeding 200 percent of our system average.)
complete teacher-student web log with automatic image thumbnails and much more
complete professional article system for course materials and professional development
membership in ESL Journal consortium

Could your local web "expert" do this, or perhaps cobble together pieces from several different providers? Maybe, but not in five days and not at this low cost. Start Now!!

A 'Free' ESL Journal for Your School

With a little gumption you can probably persuade one or more local companies to support your site, making it effectively FREE to your institution. The benefits of a linguistically skillful local workforce for your local economy should be obvious to anyone in business or government.

Of course, they won't come to you, but if you make the effort it should be easy. Naturally certain terms and conditions of service apply to your use of the system, but you'll find they are not onerous. Our goal is to provide the service for a fair price and to support your teaching efforts. Fees can be easily offset by offering sponsorships to local businesses who may be acknowledged in the publication either by a sponsor list or by banner ads, as illustrated at the top of this page. In any case, the system is much less expensive than creating a similar capability locally, even if your local service provider or school technicians could do so. When your local webmaster says he/she can duplicate the system for the price, go to your ESL dictionary and look up "lie" and/or "fool" for a concise analysis of the claim.

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Couldn't Our IT Department Just Whip Up a Similar System?

But, but, but...