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Copyright 2001-2011 Jason Renshaw / English Raven Educational Services PTY LTD. All rights reserved. ACN 123 251 927
Welcome to English Raven!
My name is Jason Renshaw, and I am the owner, writer, designer and webmaster of EnglishRaven.com. I'm from Melbourne in Australia, where I graduated with a degree majoring in English and Swedish as a Second Language from the University of Melbourne.
I've been teaching English in various settings and for a variety of purposes for the past 19 years. I started to focus on it as more of full-time profession from 1999, getting myself a TEFL certification in Manchester in the UK and heading off to teach English to children and teenagers in South Korea. It was around then that the first seeds of this website were planted.
The first 'official' English Raven pages hit the web in early 2001, employing my (at the time) very fledgling web skills. Since then, the site has accrued an enormous number of materials, resources and tools as I tried them out in classrooms and then put them into formats that would allow me to share them with other teachers around the world. As president of a Korea TESOL provincial chapter and later coordinator of the national Young Learners and Teenagers Special Interest Group (as well as a committee member with the IATEFL YLT-SIG), I developed more and more awareness about what teachers wanted in the way of materials for their classrooms.
A little later I became more involved in the management and curriculum design of English language teaching programs (as well as teacher education in pre-service university programs), and the resources on English Raven began to reflect those sorts of priorities as well. In 2007, my series Boost! Longman Integrated Skills Series was published (for learners in the 9-15 age range) and it has currently sold more than a million copies worldwide.
Commercial publishing has taught me many valuable lessons about content writing and design. Since becoming an international coursebook writer, I've concentrated on making English Raven a place where reliable materials and activities have a place alongside more innovative and experimental ones (something that is increasingly rare to see with big ELT publishers).
I maintain a well visited blog - also called English Raven - where I discuss issues and share ideas for materials design with teachers from all over the globe. I am also very active on Twitter (@englishraven), being a founder and moderator for #ELTChat, an informal weekly Twitter-based professional development initiative that happens in real-time (come join us there, we'd love to chat with you!).
Web 2.0 has blurred so many boundaries, providing (among many things) the opportunity for me to run my own online school with hundreds of learners from a home office here in Geelong, Australia. As I update the English Raven site, I am looking forward to exploring the new ground involved with educational technologies and a more 'wired' world of learners. While there is still a place for paper-based tools and materials, you can expect to see much more in the way of digital learning materials here on the site in future as well.
So many thanks to you for popping by my humble English Language Teaching resource site. I hope you find something here that you and your learners might like!
Jason Renshaw
April, 2011
Geelong, Victoria, Australia
Did you know that...
... English Raven has had more than 2 million visitors and more than 100 million page views since its founding in 2001?
... English Raven contains more than 3,000 pages of resources and materials?
... English Raven allows teachers to choose their own yearly subscription fee, based on what they feel is fair and affordable to them?
... English Raven provides materials and services free of charge to numerous non-profit and professional development organisations?
... English Raven recently made a commitment to developing more open-source materials for teachers to adapt and customise to their particular learning contexts?
