I. Introduction I what is the Online Tools for english language teaching

Setting goals for online learners

One simple way to introduce short-term goals into your online classroom is to make sure each lesson has a clear outline that you share with your student so they know where they are in the learning process and the context for any activity they are doing. Then think about how you might reward students for finishing tasks (or, even better, for working hard) during a lesson. You could try positive feedback, badges, points, playing games or doing other fun learning activities your students would like. When it comes to long-term goals, going too far into the future might not be effective, but try taking time now and then to check in with your students and set goals together for the next month, three months, or six months down the line.

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teaching jobs around the world. Progress checks for online learners For short-term progress checks, make sure you build continuity between lessons by doing quick revisions or quizzes on previous topics. A great way to remind students of their long-term progress is by building up a portfolio of work with them so they can look back themselves and see how far they've come. One way of doing this online is to start an achievement page. If you are teaching kids, every time they achieve something, you can go to the achievement page and ask them to draw something that reminds them of what they've learned (you might want to make it an achievement tree they can add to or a trophy shelf.) With teens or adult learners, you might prefer asking them to write something. As the course progresses, the page will fill up with reminders of successes and proud moments for your students.

5. Keep it interactive

Use technology. In a face-to-face class, it's typical to give students some quiet reflection time to work alone or read a text. But these kinds of activities don't translate well in online classrooms. Long, dense texts are challenging to read on a screen (it’s much easier to break things into chunks). Silence just doesn't translate that well in virtual classrooms as it provides the perfect excuse for a student's attention to drift elsewhere! Planning activities that keep your students actively clicking, typing or talking throughout the lesson is the way to go. You can do this by asking lots of questions, including games and making sure learners have to physically do things like use drawing tools or type in the dialogue boxes. And when you're planning your lesson, you can make sure your student has to say something every three minutes or so.

6. Break down the lesson and make it digestible

Timing is crucial in online teaching, and you might find you need to break up your online lessons differently than you would with face-to-face ones. As a general rule, it's a good idea to keep a fast pace and break down information into small, easily digestible chunks. In practical terms, this means to steer clear of lengthy explanations and slides with too much text! Mixing up the tempo of your lessons by adding a variety of activity types is also a great way to make the time fly by for your students. You can also write your lesson plans for the online classroom with free lesson planners like Planboard. And for online English teachers, there are plenty of free resources out there to get you started.

7. Make your students feel valued

The truth is, the isolation experienced by students studying in online classrooms can be a huge factor in making them feel demotivated. They might think that no one will notice or care if they miss a class, or find it all too tempting to not log in to the classroom if they're feeling tired. The best way online teachers can help remedy this is by making their students feel valued in the classroom. How do I do that, you ask?

Here are some suggestions:

Learn your student's name and use their name throughout the lesson, and make sure they learn yours

Follow up on what you did in previous lessons so your students know that you're on top of what they're learning (and they should be too)

Find out about your student's interests and incorporate them into the lesson where possible

Give regular feedback on your students' work

Aim to be a positive, encouraging and present

8. Be patient with your students

As anyone can tell you, keeping students engaged and stimulated is no easy task. Remember that young kids sometimes don't have very high attention spans, so it can be hard for them to sit still and focus at times.

This is totally normal and okay! It's essential to give them a break now and then and be patient with them. Your students can easily pick up whether you're annoyed or frustrated when something isn't clicking. And that makes matters worse. Give them a short break every now and then. It'll make a difference! Create a more engaging virtual classroom Teaching online takes creativity.

Online environments can be challenging to master at first, but with a little effort and time, your students will be getting the best experience possible.

And, they'll be excited to log into your classroom. To recap, here are the 8 ways to increase engagement online: Present your best (online) self

Use technology to your advantage

Find what inspires your students

Set goals and help students stick to them

Keep it interactive

Break down the lessons and make it digestible

Make your students feel valued

Be patient with your students

We hope these tips gave you a great foundation for building better online classrooms, but don't be discouraged if you still need a little more help.

If you need more help, you can always try our Online Teaching Strategies course to give you more confidence and ensure you smoothly transition into the world of online teaching.

Some of the best tutors we know are moving their businesses online, and for good reason. Tutoring students online completely eliminates the waste of spending your day traveling between appointments, which can often eat up valuable tutoring hours.

And while tutoring online may be more efficient and convenient, it’s not without its challenges.

Not every subject transfers well from in-person to online: depending on the subjects you tutor, online tutoring may not yet be perfected. Until recently, it was almost impossible to simulate the experience of freeform collaboration on a shared problem set online, as is common in math and science tutoring.

Forming an emotional connection can be challenging: when you begin teaching a new student, breaking the ice with a new student can becoming challenging, as it’s more difficult to make an emotional connection without being present in the room.

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Holding the student’s attention: when screens are open and there’s no in-person supervision, there will undoubtedly be distracting windows open on your student’s screen.

The good news is, problems like these can be solved in a variety of ways, from modifying your teaching approach to using new tools and software that help you get the job done.

Let’s walk through the software setup we at Podia recommend for the online tutor’s toolbelt.

Video chat

Podia’s Picks: Skype for 1-on-1 online tutoring sessions, Google Hangouts for group online tutoring sessions.

Both Skype and Google Hangouts (free for unlimited use, though Skype offers a premium plan for group calling) are mature products that work well and provide most of the same features: free 1–1 video or voice calls, screen sharing, file sharing and chat.

With the launch of Google Hangouts On-Air, it’s now possible to schedule a free group session in advance, which will be recorded and available after the session for students to re-watch.

This is a fantastic tool for online group tutoring — in a 6-week course, it’s unlikely that every student will be able to make every session, but with Hangouts On-Air they won’t fall behind.

Virtual whiteboard

Podia’s Picks: Baiboard for 1–1 or group tutoring sessions if you have an iPad, Idroo if you’re on a Windows or Android tablet.

For subjects like science and math, it’s critical to simulate the experience of sitting next to a student, crowded around a single exercise on paper or in a book.

When the only tools at our disposal were the keyboard and mouse, this was really tough — there’s nothing clunkier than trying to scribble math notation on a problem set with a mouse.

With the introduction of the iPad (and other tablets) and a host of networked whiteboarding apps, everything changed. The best whiteboarding apps on the market satisfy a few conditions:

Real-time: You and the student are looking at the same document, with a minimal network lag time.

Simultaneous: Multiple people can edit the document at the same time.

Flexible canvas: Allows you to upload any document to be used as the background for the lesson.

Persistent: Whiteboard sessions are stored, so that either you or the student can review the lesson afterwards (or you can share with another student or tutor).

There are five apps on the market that satisfy these conditions, and are mature enough products to be trusted in tutoring sessions:

Idroo (free for limited use, €10 a month for unlimited use) provides all of the features listed above, with a slick drag-and-drop interface for adding images to your teaching canvas. It’s also compatible with Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS and Android, so you can make use of it without an iPad. Our one issue with Idroo is the free plan only allows you to upload the first two pages of a document for use in the canvas, making it of limited use for full lessons.

Baiboard (free for unlimited use) is fantastic for conducting group sessions, as it can accommodate up to 40 participants on the same board at once. It also offers iPad-to-browser sharing, so that students can participate from anywhere.

Groupboard (free for one whiteboard, $9.99/month up to $499/one-time for more whiteboards) provides most of the same features as Idroo and Baiboard, but with a few key limitations: the free plan tops out at 5 users on one whiteboard, and background images must be image-formatted (vs PDF). Lack of PDF compatibility is a dealbreaker for many tutors — but if you’re partial to Google Hangouts and don’t need PDFs, Groupboard offers a slick integration that embeds a board into your Hangout session.

WizIQ ($16 — $1,000+/month depending on number of whiteboards / students needed) is a full-fledged e-learning platform, which has an accompanying virtual classroom app. While it includes all of the key features mentioned above, it also integrates with Learning Management Systems like Moodle and Blackboard. If you’re running an online school with a long-term student base (vs conducting tutoring sessions), then WizIQ is for you.

Scribblar ($14-$39 depending on number of ‘rooms’) is unique in that it allows you to integrate an online whiteboard directly into your own website, versus using the whiteboard on Scribblar’s own site. Leyla Norman of Empower English Tutoring enjoys using it because of the persistent nature of Scribblar classrooms, which allow students to refer back to sessions and keep track of work week-to-week.

Document collaboration

Podia’s Pick: Google Docs, enough said. Simply the best online document collaboration tool for tutoring.

There’s only one king of the Online Shared Document Jungle. Google Docs is free for unlimited use.

Screen recording

Podia’s Picks: Camtasia and Screencast-O-Matic for screen recording, Animoto for video editing, YouTube or Podia for video hosting.

Many tutors find it useful to record sessions with students, so that the student can review the lesson later on. It’s also a great way to self-critique your own teaching methods, and make improvements.

If you’re planning to develop an online course at some point, screen recording can be used to seed content and lessons. Just think about how many courses you’d already have prepared if you’d recorded every one of your tutoring sessions.

There are a few necessary, complementary tools in the online tutors video recording toolbelt:

Screen recording: Camtasia ($99 for Mac, $299 for PC) and Screencast-O-Matic (free for 15 minutes or less, $15/year for unlimited) both offer easy-to-use screen recording tools for Windows and Mac, which allow you to produce beautiful videos with a minimal learning curve. Camtasia has a more advanced video editor, and also offers mobile recording for Mac (by connecting your tablet or phone to your Mac with a lightning cable). The choice between them really comes down to how you’re using screen recordings — if you’re building an online course, we’d recommend Camtasia, but if you’re recording student sessions to save for them, we’d recommend Screencast-O-Matic.

Video editing: Both Camtasia and the pro version of Screen-o-Matic come with video editing tools built-in. But if you’re looking for a standalone editing tool (and don’t want to opt for a professional tool like Final Cut Pro), we’d recommend Animoto ($8/month). It allows you to add music, photos and text to your videos, and is great for producing online course content.

Video hosting: For one-off video hosting nothing beats YouTube (free for unlimited use) — if it’s a lesson that only involves you teaching (i.e. — doesn’t show or mention the student), you could even post the video publicly and let other students benefit from it. For online courses, we’ve built a fantastic platform at Podia(free for unlimited hosting, 10% transaction fee on courses sold) to host your videos and lessons.

Student homework

Podia’s Pick: Extempore for language tutors.

Oftentimes, tutors will assign students homework or practice questions to help reinforce the information the tutor’s been teaching. To do it, tutors usually use Word Documents and PDFs, but as online tutoring evolves, more tutors are using web products and mobile apps to help with things like assigning homework.

Here’s a tool that language tutors have recommended to us as something they use with their students:

Extempore: Extempore ($29.99 per student/year; institutional licenses are available) is for speaking practice between language tutors and students. Extempore allows students to record their homework answers directly from their mobile device, which makes it easy for tutors to review in real-time.

Squid: Squid (free with in-app purchases) is a handwritten note-taking application for Android that has two great use cases for teachers. First, teachers can import PDF worksheets into Squid and students can do the work directly on the sheets before exporting and sending them back to the teach for review. Second, tutors can import work that the student has done, mark it up, and send it back to the student to see what they did wrong.

Online course builder alternatives

Teachable alternative

Thinkific alternative

Kajabi alternative

Gumroad alternative

The Online Tutor’s Toolbelt

To sum it all up, we at Podia recommend using:

Video chat: Skype for 1-on-1 sessions, Google Hangouts for group sessions.

Virtual whiteboard: Baiboard for iPad, Idroo for Windows or Android.

Document collaboration: Google Docs

Screen recording and video production: Camtasia for online courses, Screencast-O-Matic for live sessions. Animoto for editing standalone videos. YouTube or Podia for video hosting.

Use a different online tutoring tool and love it? Let us know why at [e-mail], and we’ll add it to the toolbelt.