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nglish language teachers across the country can now share ideas on Virtual Teacher Support Network (VTSN), a free virtual service providing information on English teaching methods.

Created by the National Education Ministry and the British Council, the virtual service has four products: www.teachingenglish.org.uk and http://h2te.jardiknas.kemdiknas.go.id for teachers, www.britishcouncil.org/ learnenglishkids for children and parents and www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish for teenagers, adults and professionals.

The websites provide text material and audio visual teaching tools. The website also has teaching strategies.

While www.teachingenglish.org.uk was created by British Council and BBC, http://h2te.jardiknas.kemdiknas.go.id is the result of a cooperation between the British Council and the ministry’s Information Technology and Communication Center for Education (Pustekkom).

The British Council said it hoped the program would be able to reach and support the more than 133,000 English language teachers and 41 million students across Indonesia.

Uwes A. Chaeruman from Pustekkom said 50 teachers with outstanding teaching strategies had helped create the websites.

He said that since the websites were relatively new, there were several parts that had yet to be completed. He hoped that in the future, teachers could post teaching materials on the websites by themselves.

“The more input we have, the better performance we can achieve. This program is not only for this year, but we will continue to do this until we can switch completely to digital technology,” he said.

Gumawang Jati, a British Council consultant, said that since the program contained material intended for the global community, the team of teachers who had supplied the information for the website had tried to adopt the material to have an Indonesian context.

For example, material on Halloween, which is not common in Indonesia, was changed to the first night of Suro in Java, and a lesson about dancing mentions the Indonesian Jaipong dance.

He said that the material was not meant to replace the national curriculum and asked teachers to consider things deeply before presenting the material to the students. He said that teachers could modify the materials to include more local content.

He cited the a lesson about the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, which could be swapped for a local folktale.

“Another example is there is a story about a single parent. If the teachers think that it will make the students confused because it is not commonly found here, then they can take it out,” he said.

Linawati, a teacher from a local junior high school, said that unlike students and children nowadays, most teachers were lacking in information technology. Since the program is mostly done online, she said she hoped that there would be training on Internet usage so that teachers could perform well and make the best of the program.

“Also, the program requires equipment like computer and Internet access, while we’re just a regular junior high school. We hope there will be support for this program,” she said.