What a weird year!

This blog is a product of this year’s events. At the beginning of 2020, I moved to a new city with a list of beautiful places in Santander that I wanted to visit. The idea of having my own website hadn’t even crossed my mind before mid-March. When our in-class courses got suspended and various measures were imposed in Colombia, I suddenly found myself with a lot of free time. Since I don’t like being idle, I decided to start writing down my thoughts about my experience with teaching English in Colombia. There is quite a lot of information about this subject, but it is fragmented across many websites, so I made the decision to set up a blog to publish all my posts in one place.

I now receive visitors from search engines and not only from my social media connections, so let me quickly introduce this blog. Since launching TEFL in Colombia in September, I have been publishing a new article every Sunday at 10am (Bogotá time zone). I try to write about various topics related to teaching English in Colombia as a foreigner, and that’s why there are a few different post categories. I have published the following articles so far:

Teaching and CPD
● The importance of teaching qualifications
● The curious case of native speakerism in Colombia
● ELT Concourse is a priceless resource
● Tips for getting a CELTA Pass A
● Six ELT blogs worth following
● Applying for a teaching job in Colombia (post-pandemic)

Life in Colombia
● Everybody wants to live in Medellín
● My experience with learning Spanish
● Valle de la Samaria: Colombia’s hidden gem
● Cañón del Combeima provides a good reason to visit Ibagué

Interviews
● Jennifer Soto: We need to adapt to this new reality
● Ndana Chibanda: ELT in Colombia is a mix of fun and hard work

Important documents
● How to obtain your work visa, partner visa and cédula de extranjería

If you enjoy this type of content, consider following the TEFL in Colombia Facebok page, where I post links to all articles. WordPress users may follow this blog through the Reader. There is also an option to subscribe for old-school e-mail notifications, which doesn’t seem to be very popular. Whatever way you access this website, I appreciate the fact that you feel this blog is worth visiting. I am always happy to see my readers’ reactions on social media, and it motivates me to keep writing.

I know that posting a new article every week may not be sustainable in the long term. In fact, I am going to take a short break from blogging and try to enjoy this vacation period. I plan to be back with new content in the middle of January.

The good news is that I have plenty of ideas for posts. I managed to read some interesting books in preparation for my Delta Module Two course (which was cancelled), so I would like to write about ELT literature that I have found useful for my teaching practice. I definitely wish to continue conducting interviews because I enjoy talking to other ELT professionals about their work.

I am also open to publishing guest posts. If you are interested in contributing to this blog with your own article, feel free to get in touch.

Let’s hope 2021 will be a little more cheerful!