This toolbox will help us to be prepared before, during, and after teaching. Also, it provides alternatives to bring lives in our English class.

Readiness to teach is the prerequisite for a teacher to achieve successful teaching (Martin et al., 2019). Being ready, including EFL teacher, means owning content knowledge and pedagogical skills, including applying teaching tools for enhancing the teaching quality (Leland & Sedivy-Benton, 2016). However, some EFL teachers avoid applying teaching tools since they met some obstacles (Ghavifekr et al., 2015): 1) being unfamiliar with technology; 2) losing useful tools due to inorganization; and 3) resistance to learn/relearn. Therefore, EFL teachers in the 21^st-century era should equip themselves with many technological tools literacy to support their teaching and to mediate teaching English in a crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, which requires EFL teachers to teach online (Eryansyah et al., 2020). To avoid the loss of past teaching records and teaching tools employed, the EFL teachers should develop a toolbox for organizing useful teaching tools which in the future enable them to design more interesting and motivating, well-managed, applicable in various teaching contexts (online, offline, synchronous, and asynchronous), and beneficial to simplify teachers’ works.

Reflecting the urgency of developing a teaching toolbox especially to aid EFL teaching, I developed my personal teaching toolbox (https://afifikhwanulmuslimin.lec.uinmataram.ac.id/home) to assist my EFL teaching in various contexts. In university, I must teach some English skills and contents in a semester which requires me to adjust my teaching scenario in every class. Therefore, having organized teaching tools in a box is preferable. Then, considering my job as a lecturer which requires implementing Tri Dharma Perguruan Tinggi, therefore, the toolbox which has been designed is directed to meet its responsibilities (teaching, research, and community service). However, all the tools are still applicable to equip my EFL teaching in the future.

This toolbox is subdivided into four groups namely: tools for support, tools for teaching English, tools for research, and tools for online learning. Tools for support contain all software and websites that help me to prepare teaching materials (creating audio, preparing reading test material, developing a lesson plan, and harvesting multimedia sources); to create interesting 2D, 3D, and animation presentations; to learn and analyze words and sentences; and tools to convert media. These tools produce media for teaching English and also for community service by sharing video/audio/PPT presentations to the public. The tools for teaching English comprise websites with huge English learning resources and tools for aiding students to learn English skills (speaking, reading, writing, and listening). Tools for research serve me with data-gathering software (i.e. survey research), quantitative and qualitative data analysis tools, and similarity check tools. In addition, this tools group shares open access journal article links (i.e. UM Library web) which are useful to robust EFL students' cognition and my EFL teaching practices. Lastly, a tool for online learning gives me wide opportunities to conduct a live online meeting with virtual meeting software (i.e. zoom, G-Meet, etc.) or asynchronous online meeting with LMS (i.e. UIN Mataram LMS, Schoology, etc.). Moreover, this tools group enables me to create an interactive online meeting with games and board activities.

References

Eryansyah, Petrus, I., Indrawati, S., & Ernalida. (2020). Pre-service EFL teachers’ digital literacy and factors affecting digital literacy development. IRJE, 4(2), 402-412.

Ghavifekr, S., Kunjappan, T., Ramasamy, L., & Anthony, A. (2015). Teaching and learning with ICT tools: Issues and challenges from teachers’ perceptions. Malaysian Online Journal of Educational Technology, 4(2), 38-57. https://www.mojet.net/files/Uploads/Articles/v4i2-4pdf.pdf

Leland, K. M., & Sedivy-Benton, A. L. (2016). Traditional teacher evaluation models: Current and future trends for educators. IGI Global. https://10.4018/978-1-5225-0164-0.ch078

Martin, F., Budhrani, K., & Wang, C. (2019). Examining faculty perception of their readiness to teach online. Online Learning, 23(3), 97-119. https://10.24059/olj.v23i3.1555