English Raven

Millions of reasons for englishraven.com to celebrate!

I recently checked the English Raven site stats and noticed that it had recently clocked up its 1,000,000th (putting all the 000s there feels more impressive than writing "million", don't you think?) individual visitor. The exact figure I had on checking (today) was 1,034,958. It would have been nice to see who the 1,000,000th visitor was... Oh well, only missed him/her by 34,958 other visitors. I must pay more attention next time!

Wow. 1,000,000 people have visited the site. That is pretty cool to contemplate, but also kind of staggering. The site might not be a "big cheese" in web circles, but for a guy like me who barely knew how to use Microsoft Word to type up a resume when I started fiddling around with site building, I must say it is a pretty satisfying feeling seeing that number of visitors. It's also a humble reminder to me of just how many English teachers there are out there in the world, and by extension, how many English language learners.  WOW!!!

Million (or rather "millions") is a magic figure for English Raven in other ways as well. 2007 saw the site get 1,148,267 hits, up from the year before when it got 1,006,202 hits. It's an interesting feeling to look back over the stats and see the first year (2001) with a grand total of 88 visitors and 1806 hits overall. Those 1800 hits were no doubt mostly from me, trying to work out how the heck to make the pages work...

All in all, English Raven has (as of today) accrued 4,405,532 hits over its 6-odd years of life on the world wide web. I think that gives the site, and the million visitors to its EFL/ESL resource cyber shores, plenty of reasons to celebrate!

If you're reading this and you were one of the 1,000,000 site visitors, my heartfelt thanks, and I hope whatever you found on the site gave you and your learners a more rewarding experience in the EFL/ESL classroom.

Rightio, then. Time to start setting our sights on 10,000,000 hits to the site...

Busy, busy, busy!

 

 

 

 

English Raven reverts to free access for all

Well I'm happy to announce that English Raven (www.englishraven.com) has reverted to being a free resource site again for all teachers of EFL/ESL to young learners and teenagers. That means teachers everywhere now have completely free access to the 3000+ pages of materials and activities stored away on the English Raven site. Enjoy!

This followed a period of around four years where I was charging a membership fee to access English Raven. During that time I was subsisting mainly on a rather meagre teacher's wage here in South Korea, and with a distance MA in progress, a family on the way and a stubborn insistence to not succumb to illegal private teaching, I generally needed to supplement my income somehow... In fact, the initial decision to charge for membership was largely driven by feedback from visitors, who were telling me they couldn't believe the amount of quality materials they could access, and some actually recommended that I charge for it!

Some improvements to my salary, an international publication with Pearson Longman and a flourishing online teaching business well and truly fixed any income woes, and I immediately changed Raven back to a free resource again at the first opportunity. It's actually quite a relief for me, because I was never entirely comfortable with the idea of charging teachers to access materials to make their classes run more effectively. Teachers of young learners in particular need all the assistance they can get, and shouldn't have to pay out of their own pockets to make the schools they work at better institutions.

Well, that's that then, and I hope teachers find English Raven a useful and convenient tool.