Last January, jointly with Tom Bill, I gave a workshop at the British Council, Oporto, with the aim of introducing state-sector teachers to the Internet and of giving them a few ideas on how they might be able to use it for teaching purposes. This included making them aware of material they could use in printed format for reading exercises and web sites they could use as a medium to teach through in a multimedia classroom.

The consensus of opinion among most colleagues in Oporto was that, while the Internet was a huge source of information which excited many students, especially in Young Learner classes, its use as a teaching medium was limited by its scope and diversity and, in books written on the subject, relatively unexplored. The workshop, I believe, only brushed the surface of the potential of the Internet for teaching in a school where you can sit no more than three students to a computer and they are all in working order - the computers that is.

Having ascertained that the teachers at the workshop had only a basic knowledge of using the Internet, we started at the beginning and explained the simple mechanics of moving around. We told them there were two ways to enter the net: firstly by typing in an address you already know, in the bar at the top of the screen and waiting patiently for your web site to arrive. We wrote the address for BBC news on the board and let the teachers type it in. Once on the BBC web site, we showed them how to move up and down the page using the vertical bar at the right of the screen and how to use the back and forward buttons at the top of the screen to return to pages they had seen before. We also showed them how the cursor changed to a hand when it was moved onto a link that could take you to another page. Still on the BBC page we showed them how to add the page to a list of favourites by clicking on the favourite button at the top of the page and then 'add to favourites'. We finished off this section by telling them to print out a BBC page they were interested in by clicking on the picture of the printer at the top of the screen and then pointing out how this sort of authentic reading material could be exploited in the usual way.

We then introduced the teachers to the other way of entering the net; through a search engine or 'surfing'. We showed the teachers how surfing could be useful when teaching a course book organised thematically and gave them an example. I use the net myself frequently for this to find related authentic material. Recently on an Upper Intermediate Matters theme of gambling I typed in "gambling" on the Yahoo search engine and after a bit of looking around found a useful Gamblers Anonymous page with questions and answers about gambling addiction. In the class I blanked out the answers, got students to write out their answers and then gave them the originals to compare. We gave the teachers an idea for using any page on a subject the students are interested in. Using a Titanic page as a tool, we told the teachers to read the text and then write questions about it to pass on to other students with the relevant address, in much the same way as a lot of course books exploit reading passages. The advantage with the Internet is, however, that the students can find a passage they are genuinely interested in. Alternatives to this could be students writing questions on a theme and letting the other students find the answers without the address, or students writing questions before going on the computers and then trying to find the answers to their own questions.

The next page we directed the teachers to was the London Active Map, which shows a tube map of the capital. By clicking on various stations on the tube you are shown further information about the sights in that area. Coupled with another site, the London Event Guide, we suggested that teachers could exploit this material in the following way. After reading through the material available, write out role cards for people planning a trip to London and then tell the students to plan a schedule for the roles, bearing in mind their likes, dislikes, budget, etc. As a follow up, students could write a short paragraph about why they planned the route they did as a First Certificate-type exercise.

Next we told the teachers to go to the International Lyrics Page, which has the words to over 60,000 songs and increases daily. We let the teachers find the words to favourite songs and pointed out the usefulness of the page, which eliminates those irksome times most teachers have gone through of sitting listening to a cassette while trying first to decipher and then to write down every word. In addition to this, songs can be found containing specific grammar structures by going into the whole text search and simply typing in the desired structure, e.g. must / if I were / would / have been / can, etc. These could then be used with, or without, the music as reading or listening exercises.

After this we directed the teachers to a useful web site, Dave's ESL cafe. We showed the teachers how to register for a chat room and how to use it once in. The teachers chatted for a while (mostly amongst themselves as there weren't many people there at the time) and saw how this kind of exercise would obviously be extremely motivating for younger students, who normally hate any kind of writing exercise in a classroom situation. Chatting could also be very useful for formulating questions which most students need work on. For something a bit more stimulating we entered the Discussion Centre, where the teachers read longer texts on specific themes from other language learners around the world. In a class situation the students would choose a theme that interested them, read the comments and then write a paragraph or so in reply, putting forward their own point of view. Once again this would be a writing exercise with a real purpose and not something that would be simply corrected and then end up in the bin.

Still on Dave's ESL cafe, we showed teachers the Quiz page, where students could do an interactive quiz on a number of subjects, including grammar. These could be used as a follow up to the teaching of a specific grammar point or on the history and geography themes, as a fun exercise testing general knowledge and giving the students passive exposure to a variety of question forms. I used them to good effect in one lesson in the above way as a competition, giving the students a time limit and a point every time the computer awarded them 100 %.

To finish off the session we told the teachers how they could devise a 'Treasure Hunt' for students on a few sites related to a theme or a grammar point. The teacher would prepare a number of questions and then tell the students to find the answers. The teacher could either give the students, a) all the addresses they needed, b) all the addresses they needed plus a few red herrings, or c) no addresses at all (for well-practised students). We gave the teachers the task to find a script for an episode of the "Young Ones" T.V. programme without any clues and were relieved when one group found it in about five minutes. We then played a video of an episode and let the teachers follow it on screen, thinking about how they could use the material in the classroom. We gave them a few ideas including printing out script extracts and asking the students to predict the visuals or what will happen next. They could also do cut up and jumble text exercises or construct sentences from the action on the video and elicit sentence transformations from the students.

We gave the teachers all the addresses we had used plus a few others, including one for a site called Earth Xchange which I have been using with a YL1 class. It's organised by a college in Australia and its aim is to link a lot of schools across the globe. Earth Xchange sets projects for schools to carry out which can be E-mailed and then added to the site. So far they have made a web site on the Internet from something my YL1 class wrote about the British Council in Oporto. They also told me they could put photos of my class on the site when I eventually get round to sending them. The students can access the web sites of other schools around the world and communicate with them on topics of interest. I have already received an E-mail from a school in England wanting to find out some specific things about Portugal from my students, which I'll get them to reply to in the near future.

I got the impression most of the teachers who attended the workshop were excited by the amount of current authentic material they had access to and saw great potential for using some of the web sites for lesson preparation. On the down side, computers can be slow or temperamental, though students seem to develop remarkable powers of patience when dealing with machines, which they wouldn't if the teacher switched off for two minutes. On the plus side, the opportunities for writing tasks with real communication value are numerous and stimulating.