Life is a mess, so this seems like an appropriate introduction

Life is a mess. That is probably not what you expected from the opening of a post called What Is Project English?, but I have already set an expectation and broken it in the first sentence. Hopefully that will not become a recurring theme.

If you are reading this, there is a decent chance you are an educator, a language learner, someone interested in one of the projects on this website, or somebody who clicked a link and is now wondering who made all of this.

My name is Abderrahman Alamrani, and I am an English language teacher in Morocco. This is usually the point where the professional biography is supposed to begin: degrees, qualifications, experience, and respectable sentences about a passion for education. I can give you some of that, although my route into teaching was not particularly neat.

I have a BA in English Studies, which I was reluctant to finish but eventually did. After spending about a year doing very little with it, I decided that getting a job might be useful. My teacher training did not happen in one place or through one programme. It started with initial training in a private school and continued through webinars, seminars, and more formal training opportunities both in Morocco and abroad. Later, when I entered the process of joining the public education system, I completed the required training at a regional centre for education and professional development as part of getting the government position.

So the regional centre was not where everything started. By the time I reached it, I had already spent time learning, training, observing, and working through different parts of the profession in different settings.

I am qualified to teach in both public and private institutions across most of the levels I am likely to encounter. I say most because I have very little interest in teaching anyone younger than about fifteen.

That is the professional version. The less polished version is that I do not particularly enjoy where teaching has taken me as a career. I still care about the work itself, and I care about doing it properly, but I have a much more complicated relationship with the profession around it. From where I stand, there are limited places to go without moving away from the classroom and toward administration, bureaucracy, paperwork, and jobs that increasingly have less to do with actually teaching.

There is much more to say about that, but this is not that post.

So why does this website exist?

Project English exists partly because I have other skills and interests that do not have much room in my government job.

Technology is the obvious example. There is plenty of talk about integrating technology into education, and now increasingly about AI in education, but the daily reality I work in is much simpler. A whiteboard and markers remain the main classroom technology. A projector can be useful, but projecting the same material that could have been handed out on paper is not exactly the digital transformation people imagine when they read headlines about the future of education.

That gap has always bothered me, and it bothers me even more when conversations jump immediately to AI while much more ordinary problems around access, infrastructure, digital literacy, devices, and practical classroom use remain unresolved.

Maybe the headlines about educational technology represent sincere attempts to improve things. Maybe some of them are mostly headlines. I have become increasingly suspicious of the distance between announcements and what actually reaches a classroom. I promise I am not trying to build an entire website around cynicism; I just have a difficult time separating the sincere attempts from the bullshit sometimes.

Building things gives me somewhere else to put that energy.

Project English is my portfolio

The simplest explanation is still the best one: Project English is my portfolio.

It is where I show projects, services, experiments, applications, teaching tools, writing, and other things I make. Some of them solve real problems. Some exist because I wondered what would happen if I combined one idea with another. Others are exercises in making something simply because I wanted to see whether I could.

The name itself is not particularly clever. Project English popped into my head because I needed a name and could not think of a better one. I took some comfort from the fact that one of the most influential technology products of the last few years is called ChatGPT, which is an incredibly generic technical name that somehow became a global brand.

So Project English stayed, and, to be fair, it describes the website reasonably well. English is part of my work, and most of what I do here starts as a project.

Main quests and side quests

I tend to divide what I make into something resembling main quests and side quests.

The main quests are usually connected to teaching. The Project English Placement Test is one example. It gives learners a free way to get an estimate of their English level regardless of whether they have any intention of studying with me afterward.

The Learning Hub is much more specific. I built it for my actual students as a lightweight LMS-style website where I can publish resources, assignments, diagnostic tests, worksheets, and supplementary material. It is my attempt to make the idea of integrating technology into my own teaching practically useful rather than leaving it as something that exists in a presentation or headline.

There are also apps and tools I use for work. Scholaris, Notiva, and the Studio belong broadly in that category, along with other tools I have built and may eventually make public.

Those are the main quests. The side quests are where things become less sensible.

Sometimes I just want to make things

My first app was Spanio, an event and days counter. There are already plenty of apps that do something similar, so its existence is difficult to justify as an attempt to fill some enormous gap in the market. That was never really the point. For me, it was an exercise in creation. I wanted to make it, so I made it. As it happens, I also use it every day to keep track of events and deadlines, which is enough justification for me.

Imperial Epigraphs started differently. I was using a website and kept thinking that the idea would work better for me as an app. Eventually the obvious question appeared: why not make one? So I did.

There are more apps like that on the way. A couple have already been planned, although an unexpected opportunity recently forced me to slow down some of the other work while I see where that goes.

I also make music. I take photographs. I write. I taught myself enough programming to make the things I wanted to make, first through books and tutorials and later with the increasingly strange experience of building software with AI alongside the usual process of searching, asking questions, getting things wrong, and figuring them out.

I do not consider myself an exceptional programmer, photographer, musician, or writer. I am simply interested enough in all of them to keep making things, and Project English gives those things somewhere to exist together.

And then there is the blog

The blog serves a slightly different purpose. The projects show what I make. The blog is where I can explain how I see things.

Some posts are about English language teaching because that is the field I work in. Others are about technology, AI, education, books, language, digital culture, things I have watched or read, or questions that have been sitting in my head long enough that writing about them becomes the easiest way to get rid of them.

I am not trying to turn every post into academic research, and I am not interested in pretending that every thought needs to become a grand argument. Sometimes I want to explain something. Sometimes I want to recommend a book or a resource. Sometimes I want to take an idea apart. Sometimes I disagree with the way a subject is being discussed and want enough space to explain why.

Which brings me to the obvious question.

Why a blog and not a YouTube channel?

Nobody reads blogs anymore, apparently. Everyone watches video. Everything needs to be short, visual, immediate, optimized, clipped, captioned, and ready to survive an attention span measured in seconds.

That is probably an excellent argument for starting a YouTube channel. It is also not really me.

I watch YouTube, sometimes a lot of it, but I still read blogs, articles, books, documentation, essays, and long pieces about subjects I care about. Given the choice, I usually prefer reading and writing to watching someone explain the same idea to a camera.

Video can be informative, beautifully produced, entertaining, and useful. I am not arguing otherwise. I simply prefer text when I want to explore an idea properly, and I prefer writing when I want to work out what I actually think.

So Project English has a blog. That may be unfashionable. I can live with that.

What I want this place to do

My objective for Project English is not especially complicated. I want somewhere to show what I make, explain why I make some of it, share what I know, and occasionally make something useful for somebody else.

The teaching tools have specific uses. The Placement Test exists for learners who want an estimate of their level. The Learning Hub exists for my students. The apps each solve a particular problem or answer some variation of what if I made this? The blog is where I get to write about everything surrounding those projects and the other subjects that interest me.

Some things here will be serious. Some will be experiments. Some may fail. Some will probably be replaced by better versions later. That is fine. A portfolio that only shows perfectly finished things would not be a very accurate representation of how I work anyway.

So that is Project English: my portfolio, my projects, my writing, and a collection of main quests and side quests that happen to share the same website. If something here is useful to you, even better.

Start Exploring

If this is your first visit, the easiest way to understand Project English is simply to look around. You can try the Placement Test, explore the projects and apps, read through the blog, or check the individual project pages to see what each one does.

Some projects are made for learners, some for my students, some for teachers, and some exist because I wanted to build them. There is no required order. Pick whichever rabbit hole looks interesting.