But I also remember that the site was a little creaky even back then. I would suddenly stumble across another corner of the site with a couple dozen activities that would have been really useful to me if I’d found them a month or two earlier.

I noticed that textbook listings or activities sometimes referred to previous versions of the textbook. I remember trying to contribute my own activities, but the submission form was broken. I noticed that no new warm-ups ever made their way into the listings, and new activities only trickled in in bursts.

A couple years later I met Al, another ALT here in Nagano. I was surprised to hear that he was the person running Englipedia. He wasn’t the original creator, but he was managing the site and looking for volunteers to help modernize it.

To hear him tell it, the site was originally built using some particular web software called Sharepoint. As the site grew larger and larger, it only became more difficult to manage.

If a user submitted a new activity, Al said it took him about 30 minutes to add it to the site. He had to copy and paste all of the information, upload files, and then go through the site and manually add links to it on any page that might be relevant. To make matters worse, the platform that the site was running on was being shut down, so there was no choice but to seriously rebuild and redesign it.

My understanding is that Al and the site’s original owner had different ideas about where to take the site in the future. Al decided it would be better to make a new site using the lessons he’d learned from managing Englipedia. I got in touch with him about a year ago to start outlining ideas for what would become ALTopedia, and we launched it in the spring of 2018.

Englipedia, and other sites that function on a wiki-style model, can suffer from one big weakness as they grow larger – they were designed to be static web pages where users manually create links between them.

On a small site where one administrator can keep track of everything, this can be manageable, but a site the size of Englipedia ran into problems with discoverability.

Should this board game be linked under “Junior High School – General”? It uses mostly past tense questions, but also “can” – should it be linked under both grammar points? Maybe a teacher has discovered that the game works well for a small class of elementary-aged students, but there may not be any effective way to communicate this alongside dozens of other small tasks the site’s administrator needs to perform. And how much time is it going to take to rebuild textbook listings when they get revised?

You’ve probably seen them on sites like blogs. They’re similar to hashtags from different social media services. An activity has a big list of tags on it – things like its grammar point, the appropriate school level, which parts of learning it uses, and even if it applies to a particular textbook.

If you want to find more activities using that grammar point, you can click on the tag and go to a listing of all activities that use it. The listing will always be up to date, and since the site’s database was designed with them in mind, they’re updated automatically.

Submitting an activity is as simple as signing up and filling in a standard web form. There’s a list of grammar points and other information, which will become tags that help users find the activity.

We have a moderator check activities really quick to make sure that they aren’t spam, but all they have to do is click a button and it’s up on the site.

If you really like an activity (including your own) you can give it a thumbs up, which will make it show up higher in search results.

I’ve tried to design the site so it can be an effective vault for a huge number of activities, while still being easy to search and use.

The design is lightweight and works with mobile devices and tablets, so even if you’re stuck using your school’s ancient computer (or your smartphone), you can still use the site. I’m still coding and adding features to the site, so you can always drop a line and I’ll see what I can do.

A lot of people went to considerable effort to share their activities and games with other teachers. In its last few years the community seemed to shrink a lot, but we’re hoping we can build something even better.

I’ve uploaded a lot of my activities that I’ve come up with over the years, but the site won’t be a great resource until it has contributions from a wide variety of people.

We’d be happy to see yours!