Teaching English online: opportunities and pitfalls

There are many different things to consider when it comes to online teaching. The good news is that online teaching opens up new levels of creativity and opportunity for you as a teacher. In a way, it drives you to surpass yourself and focus more on best practice as well as innovation. As for students, they are our digital natives, and they deserve to be taught with 21st-century technology.

Many freelance teachers teach through Skype. It’s the simplest thing to do, as Skype is very stable for audio quality and you simply screen-share your desktop to show PowerPoint presentations or work directly from educational websites. While Skype works for small-scale teaching, you need something more sophisticated for larger groups or getting your school or organisation online. When I started, I made a beeline for platforms with virtual classrooms, as it just seemed the natural thing to do. I found a community of teachers on WizIQ who were very inspiring, and we worked together for two years on our Edupunk creativity experiments. This was how I learnt the ropes, and learnt how to manage groups online. Once a week, I held an open creativity class on poetry, games or story-telling, and students from all over the world would log in.

Resources and content creation

As for resources, the following sites have wonderful materials if you don’t feel like re-inventing the wheel. One outstanding find is the English Out There initiative by Jason West who has created six-level courses of English that incorporate the use of social media for fluency development, confidence-building and social/emotional engagement. ESOL Cambridge has free online exam materials for teachers and other online preparation courses. The British Council also provides a lot of online support for IELTS preparation. Other great resources can be found at busyteacher.org, EFL classroom 2.0, and Teachers Pay Teachers.