I am always trying to create new tools for English teachers to make use of. There has been an enormous community of ELT bloggers that have sprung up of late. I personally find this to be very welcoming and encouraging to see so many people contributing new and fresh ideas to the community.

English teachers are an unusual group of professionals. We are spread out all through the world and deal with different cultures and teaching styles. We ourselves often come from a diverse background from native speakers in North America to those in the United Kingdom and Australia to bilingual teachers from practically every country. We quite literally herald from the four corners of the map.

This diversity has given rise to an equally diverse group of bloggers that are eager to share ideas and opinions with one another. It's great to be a part of such a giving group of people. It's also good to have leaders like Karenne Sylvester to help foster a vibrant community. And to have contributors like Larry Ferlazzo, Shelly Terrell, and Nik Peachey (just to name a few).

ELT Blog Search

With all this diversity, it's pretty easy to miss an article here and there. There is a constant stream of content about ELT out there and it's hard to keep your thumb on it all. So I decided to put together a little tool to help find the articles that I need when I might need to do some research later. Luckily, Google has a fun little tool that allows you to build custom search engines.

And so I give you ELT blog search available at http://search.englishspark.com A tool that brings together over a 100 blogs focused on ELT to search within. The search is first seeded with bloggers from BELTFree a community of Bloggers in ELT and Freelance which is a group founded and ran by Karenne Sylvester. There will also be a few other note-worthy blogs added as needed to round out the search experience.

If you feel like you have a blog and you are not a member of BELTFree, please email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with information about your blog. Generally speaking, all blogs providing quality and consistent content will be added to the search. Hopefully, after I get some other things out of the way, I'll have time to publish profiles for each of the blogs in the search. In the meantime, please let me know about any suggestions you might have in the comments or via email.

If anyone would like to feature the search in a wiki, Ning, or any other platform, let me know. I can share the code with you or give you a different flavor of it (different colors, logo, etc..) if you like.

Photo by Michael David Pederson