As I explained in a previous post, I started the new year by signing up to a take an online course to get my TEFL certification, but before I choose which program I was going to go with, I did about a month worth of research of good programs. And there are tons. I even looked to see if the local community college near me offered a course. It didn’t.

If you google TEFL certification, you get bombarded with loads of articles and company links. I think I click through several of them before relying on a site that had tons of reviews. I cannot for the life of me find that site again, but it did help me narrow which on was affordable and had the course I was looking for.

In the end I choose to go with International TEFL Academy since it was highly recommended. As of right now, the price for the course is a little under $1400, but if you are like me and signed up to get emailed information and waited for a ‘holiday’ sale, you can get it at a lower discount. I waited until after Christmas for their ‘After Christmas’ discount price and I think I paid around $900. Now that doesn’t include your textbook, which you can either get as a digital copy (cheaper, around $40) or have a physical one mailed. I went with download route and have printed out each chapter as I need it. It is now currently stored in a huge binder. Even cheaper route is not to buy the textbook and just read them on the program’s moodle. They have lots of videos that correlate to the chapters and the links are easily accessible from the moodle.

There are some cheaper companies offering similar programs, but I like that the one I choose course is very interactive with not only your teacher but with your fellow course-mates. There is a lot of forum interaction with each other and tons of discussions. It also requires 20 hours of live teaching, which I will get to in a bit.

Before beginning the course you are given a pre-course module to read on. It’s just a brush up on grammar and it about a 15/20 minute read.  Once you start the course, it’s very helpful to remember when you are creating your lesson plans. Each week you have several tasks t to complete. As you can see, I like to stay quite organized. I wrote down each task that I needed to complete before the following Sunday when the last few are due. The Peer Participation Forum is where the teacher has a topic question for the week and the students are to respond with a short paragraph or two before Friday night. It’s also where you can respond to our fellow course mates’ comments. There is another forum just to talk to each other and ask questions.

As you can tell, I am a meticulous note taker. For me, it helps me retain the information more if I can write the main points in my own words. The first couple of chapters are more informative, theories and methods on teaching English as a Second Language (ESL). We didn’t start preparing activities and lesson plans until Chapter 5. I was a complete wreck for my first lesson plan since I felt like I had no idea what to do.

That’s where a computer and nights of research comes into play. About 85% of your homework or lesson planning is going to be you researching ideas, activities and putting your own spin on it. Your trying to be creative, fun and informative. It was hard, but fun.

Around Week 6 or 7, we got a reminder to start thinking about our final project or Thematic Unit.  It is the major one where you create a week, three 1-hour lesson plans that follow a theme. My lesson plan was designed around the theme of travel / tourism for Intermediate teenagers / young adults. I originally planned on a cooking / food theme, but changed my mind. It’s a good idea to get started on this as early as you can. I started researching two weeks and a brief outline of what I wanted to accomplish two weeks before it was due. All I needed to work on were the activities and materials that I would need for them.

After getting the Thematic Unit done, now came the hardest part: fulfilling the 20 hours of live teaching or the “Practicum”. I know I was going to discuss my practicum, but this post is already getting quite long. So we will touch that in another post. Maybe next week?

Bye for now, Jane