"An innovative Israeli internet site for teachers of English
as a second language has attracted attention from all over
the world."

ASK just about any English teacher here in the country what "ETNI" stands for and they will tell you "angels of teachers of English as a Foreign Language in Israel".
Yeah, I know the letters don't exactly match, but enter the wonderful world of "English Teachers Network in Israel" and you'll see why they are angels.
Here you will find over 2,000 pages covering just about any related and many non-related teaching topics to help the teacher, the student-teacher, pupils and even parents as they tread their way in and out of the EFL classroom.

CHIEF Angel is the founder of ETNI, Canadian David Lloyd, who, being a former EFL teacher here in Israel, knows of what he speaks. David is helped by co-site manager Gail Mann, who is from South Africa, and Ellen Serfaty who is from New York and Florida. All are teachers or former teachers, giving them the advantage of knowing and understanding the needs of the educator and the student and trying to make sure that ETNI addresses them all.

THE original aim of ETNI, which was set up in 1997, was to be an English Teachers' network on the Internet to serve both as a professional support group by teachers and for teachers and also a way to encourage teachers to use the Internet in the classroom. ETNI has successfully done this over the years and then some.

THERE are two main components to ETNI.
Let's start with the mailing list. When a member sends a message to the mailing list, it is fowarded to over 1,300 other members on the list. Membership is not limited to Israeli teachers and there are ETNI members from all over the world. The mailing list is very active and serves as a forum for the discussion of many issues relating to the teaching of English in Israel. It has also led to the successful immigration and absorption of many teachers to Israel, who found work, sometimes even an apartment, as well as finding answers to their many questions when making the big move to Israel.
Then there's the web site itself: Here there are over 2,000 web pages covering a wide professional area with frequent trips into the personal/personnel zone.

A smattering of examples of the help ETNI provides are lesson plans/ideas sent in by teachers, a Ministry Section where Ministry information is posted, a "Dealing with Tragedy" section to help teachers work with their students through the troubled times we are experiencing, a job section where job announcements are posted daily, a guide on how to integrate music into the EFL classroom, lost and found help related to texts, poems, etc. even renting a summer home and getting confirmation of the latest changes in the Ministry!
But that's not nearly all. There is a cyber library, cartoons from The Far Side which attempt to integrate humor and the lighter side of life into the classroom, the ETNI calendar, a section for students with special needs, project-oriented learning, and most recently, a "chat" discussion over issues affecting the EFL teacher. And those are just samples.

NOR is the Arab sector ignored on ETNI. For Arabic-speaking EFL teachers, ETNI is constantly trying to get more involvement on a number of different planes. Says Gail Mann, who does a lot of work with the Arab sector, "We constantly encourage Arab teachers to join the ETNI mailing list and visit and use the website. We get a lot of support in this area from the English Inspectors and teacher training colleges. We include all the Moslem and Christian holy days on our cultural calendar and prepare pages of links for these days just as we do for the Jewish days in the ETNI holiday section.
"In January, there was an ETAI conference (English Teachers' Association of Israel) for the Arab sector in Haifa and we gave a workshop on ETNI in order to make more teachers aware of us. And we are in the process of having a special ETNI section for Arabic speaking English teachers and making it into a branch of ETNI."

"THE religious sector is very strongly represented on ETNI," adds David Lloyd.
"ETNI is even used by orthodox Jewish day schools in North America to find e-pals in orthodox religious schools in Israel. Orthodox religious schools in Israel constantly use the ETNI jobs section to find teachers for their schools. Also, when creating our holiday pages, we try to represent all the branches of Judaism in the links that are listed. And there always seems to be an almost equal representaiton of "religious" and "secular" teachers at the ETNI workshops that we give."

ALTHOUGH the Ministry of Education works with ETNI, the Ministry has absolutely no say over how ETNI is run or what appears on the ETNI site. The Chief Inspector for English in Israel, Judy Steiner, is very much involved in the discussions on the ETNI list, answering questions from the ETNI members directly on the site.
One very good example of how this network has strengthened the influence of Israeli teachers was when the English Ministry decided to come out with a new curriculum for English teaching in Israel. A draft of the new curriculum was put up on the ETNI site, and the English Ministry asked teachers to send in their comments and suggestions for changes. These comments/suggestions were then taken to the committee in charge for setting up the new curriculum and were integrated into the final result.

MEMBERSHIP of ETNI, which it is important to note, is a volunteer organization, is not listed by country, rather only by e-mail address.
E-mails received have come from Argentina, Brazil, France, Taiwan, Japan, U.S., Canada, Guadeloupe and the West Indies. David Lloyd reports that there are also many hits from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Morocco although he doesn't know if anyone is subscribed from there. There are, however, Israeli Arab and Palestinian teachers who are ETNI members.
The ETNI site itself is visited by people from a large number of countries.
The web statistics for the last four days alone show that the Israeli ETNI site was visited by people from 50 countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, Poland, Russia, Greece, Belgium, New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand, Sweden, Morocco, Spain,Brazil, Italy, Venezuela, Taiwan, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Norway, Indonesia, Croatia, Switzerland, Romania and Pakistan. There have also been visits to ETNI from many more countries than those listed above. And although this was not the intention when starting the network, ETNI does bring together people from all over the world and shows a different side of our country, one not involved in politics and surely a more softer side. In these days, it can only help in making new friends.

DAVID Lloyd and partners have recently opened a mirror ETNI site on a US server - - which supplies faster access to people from North America and also offers a backup server for times when the Israel server is down. This happens from time to time at Midreshet Ben Gurion where the server is located. "By having a mirror site, we can guarantee access to the ETNI site 100% of the time, as the chances of both servers being down at the same time are very small."
In 1995, David Lloyd approached the Ministry of Education with the idea of setting up a virtual teacher's network. The Ministry thought it was a good idea but had their doubts and, not surprisingly, no funds to support it. The Internet was relatively new and unknown then... very few people even knew what it was, let alone had access to it. But David Lloyd, who is self-taught in computers, was not deterred.
For thousands of EFL teachers, students and their parents all over the world, lucky he wasn't.