My “Online” Journey

In this post, I would like to talk a little bit about what I like to call the e-teacher and teaching online.

About two years ago I was looking for a job and a friend of mine commented about this great
opportunity to work online. I thought for a moment, wow, this is a great opportunity to keep doing what
I love and work from home! No need to deal with traffic, lost of paperwork, exams, and parents... ooops.

As I signed up for the job and started getting my first students (mainly Chinese children) I started loving
it, although at first it seemed to be a little strange. It was my first time doing this and having worked in a
classroom for almost eight years made the student-teacher relation a bit distant and cold. However, with
every class I got to meet my students, know about their strengths and weaknesses just as I do with
other face-to-face jobs, and the most important thing of all, in my opinion, I started learning about their
culture!

I started working for a family company called Violet English. This company, as it is small, does not have
a set platform where I can log in and start my class as other companies do (more on that later). Hence,
I started using apps such as QQ international and Wechat to teach. Both apps, Wechat more than QQ
are incredibly easy to use. I even like Wechat better than WhatsApp! So, once I passed the interview
process, which was very simple and short, the teacher in charge of the online lessons, gave me a
calendar to schedule my free hours.

It is important to notice that we (Paraguay) are twelve hours behind Beijing. This difference in time zone
ended up being extremely convenient. While students in China decide to study at night (part of their
shadow teaching/learning experience which is very common in China) it is morning time for us. Classes
would normally start at 6 am and last three hours (not with the same student though!). Violet English
sets their class to be 25 minutes long. If you have two classes in one hour, you get a 5 minute break
between classes. If students like your classes and your accent (incredibly important when teaching
Chinese students) they tend to choose you as their teacher. Likewise, if they don’t like you, you could
have one class with them and that is it.

With time, I got lucky. Students liked my classes and I started having five to six classes a day almost
everyday. This was a great source of $$$ every month (on top of my regular job). Since I had taken the
TOEFL exam and had gotten a great score, many students would sign up to practice TOEFL speaking
and/or writing with me. I loved this for several reasons. Most TOEFL students would have a really high
English level and were already practicing TOEFL on their own. They just sign up for online classes for
a little bit of an extra push. My online boss would send all materials to teach and this made the job
incredible easy and simple. We all know it is time consuming and stressful to create materials for
students. So, it is nice to take a little break from that! Also, students would have a great attitude towards
learning (and this applies to ALL chinese students btw). Every suggestion given by me was appreciated.
I was in teacher heaven.

The students who were not practicing for any international exam were mostly young children. Now this
was a bit challenging. Have you ever gotten your five-year-old in front of a screen to sing the ABCs with
a complete stranger? for 25 minutes? Try it and let me know how it goes. Apparently, my sympathy and
charisma did not reach my young learners so they got bored by second 3 of the English class. I started
losing most of my young learners and stayed with a couple of older students and then mostly teenagers.
This was not bad just a teeny tiny bit frustrating. Don’t you want to be liked by ALL your students?
Anyway, classes kept and keep going smoothly. Teaching online is definitely something I would
recommend people doing, at least once, although it is a job, a serious one, not something you do out of
boredom.

Three years have passed after this first experience with online teaching and all I can say is that I can see
myself doing this for a long time. It is not only the comfort of working from home, not wearing a school
uniform, not commuting, no extra work for which I am not getting paid, etc. Do not get me wrong, I love
being in a classroom and seeing my students’ faces light up whenever we play their favorite game or
sing their favorite songs. Or even when I see they are actually learning new content or speaking new
English words, words I taught them! But we all know that to be in the educational system takes its toll on
people that is why we love vacation. Am I not right?

By teaching online I do not only take a break from all the stress of working for an institution full-time but I
keep doing what I love and believe it or not I get challenged by new students’ learning styles,
preferences and personalities. I still have to reinvent myself every once in a while and bring to class
new flashcards and puppets to call students’ attention. I still get to behave in a professional way by
logging in on time, writing student reports, establishing good rapport with students (and parents
sometime) and overall being a professional teacher. This is not vacation time obviously, not if you are
doing it well.

I would like to finish by saying that as I am more aware of other companies hiring online teachers, the
qualifications needed by an EFL online teacher, especially in our case (non-native speakers)  and the
benefits of this kind of job and what it can lead to, I am more than ever, committed to improve my
teaching practices and profile. This kind of job allows me to make extra money, work part-time, learn
about other cultures from the comfort of my couch (or bed) and grow professionally in what might
become the future of a lot of teaching practices. In future posts, I would like to explore the other options
for companies who look for online teachers and also the qualifications needed, since these, in my
experience, are decisive when trying to get hired.

Thanks for reading this post! It was nice to reflect and write about my own experience on something that
seems not common yet in Paraguay but is slowly starting to grow.

Story telling is fun!

Hi everyone, in this short post I want to share with you some of the pages I found very interesting and have story telling material.

We all know children love stories but sometimes it is hard to get the books or to find a suitable topic for a class.

Below I will post some links of the pages I found that contain books for free that you can download and also some youtube links with my favorite stories.

Enjoy.

https://freekidsbooks.org/

Children story books online: http://www.magickeys.com/books/

Children books with audios: http://www.mightybook.com/

PDF books for kids available for download: http://www.kidsworldfun.com/ebooks.php

one more link, books available for printing: http://www.kidsenglishbooks.com/

My favorite books:

The Giving Tree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sjb0tapyDAc

Pete the Cat and his White Shoes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwUlh3i4qto

Pete the Cat and his four Groovy Bottons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkQ4d_fff3E

Olivia by Ian Falconer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T23Eckis0xQ

Children and Teens Materials

Hi everyone! Happy Monday!

In this post I want to share some of the pages I usually use to get materials for my classes. Some of these pages contain useful PDFs with content for teaching children and they are GREAT! I have printed them and laminated some for my classes and my students love them. What is more! I am also sharing a page with some PPT templates that you can adapt for your teens' classes as well as your children's classes.


http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/my-printables

http://www.itsybitsyfun.com/

http://fromabcstoacts.com/

http://supersimplelearning.com/

http://theinspiredapple.net/

https://mrprintables.com/

http://blog.theconnectionweshare.com/

Looking for PPT templates!? look no further! I found this great link with some PPT templates which are super useful in case you want to make your class more dynamic but do not find the time to actually make new games. Use these templates and adapt them to your classes!

https://tekhnologic.wordpress.com/2016/12/27/10-powerpoint-games/

Enjoy and have fun!

Teaching Teens

Hi everyone! happy Sunday!

We recently prepared and carried out a couple of workshops where we shared some of the games we use to enhance our students' participation in class as well as increase their motivation.
Below there is copy of our PPT with activities' names, explanations, and some videos so you can see how some games are played.

Enjoy!

Treasure Hunt: this is a very famous game you probably know already. Make a list of "information" your students have to find. It can be whatever. Students can look for irregular or regular verbs around the class. They can look for information such as find the capital if_____ in the map and write it down. How many chairs are there in class n°_______. Have students walk around the class/school/institute/library/computer lab to find this info. They will have a blast!

Shazam: I think you probably know what the app Shazam can do so in this case have your students become the app. Play whatever song (famous at the moment, top hits, or whatever they might be listening) and have them guess the name of the song and the singer or band that performs it.

Hey Mr. Dj: similarly to Shazam, have students choose the song and the class must guess.

Emoji activities rock! students (and teachers) use emojis all the time while texting. One suggestion of an activity could be creating stories and adding emojis just like a text message is written. Have students practice simple past by writing what they did last week and add emojis to their paragraphs.
Another great activity is playing guessing games and having students write the name of movies or songs with emojis. Check out these youtube videos and guess some yourself!
guess the action movies

Jenga: a great way to play Jenga and practice English is by either painting your blocks in different colors or adding numbers to them. After that, on a PPT or the board include questions or challenges for students according to the color or number they chose

Liar: this is the same game as the famous "Bullshit". Students in a group receive a set of cards with pics on them such as bigfoots, dragons, birds (it could be any topic) clockwise students place their cards face down on the table (no one sees the card) and say they have a "bigfoot" for example. If someone thinks the student is lying they say "liar" if the did not tell the truth the get the "nose" (seen in the picture above) if the student told the truth the one who accused him gets the nose.

Ludo: playing Ludo is quite easy and it is a game every one knows. To make it more educational have students answer questions everytime they get a turn. For example: students answer a questions then they get to role the dice and move spaces.

5second rules: this game can be played with the board game (as seen in the pic) or with a timer. Have students come up with 3 words from any topic (3 junk food restaurants, 3 Justin Bieber songs, 3 yellow fruits) and they have to do this in 5 seconds to get points.

Pictionary: Pictionary is known by everyone! and can be played with the game board or with cards made by the teacher. A variation of this game could be having students draw movie names or songs and have the class guess the movie or song the classmates are drawing.

Flyswatter activities: use sight words when playing with flyswatter, paste them on the board or place them on the floor and have student hit whatever word you say. This is a great activity to review verbs in the past or words that have a similar pronunciation.

Chain games: chain games require no material use! the way we used it once is the following: student 1 says if it rains I will not go to the park. student 2 if he does not go to the park he will not meet us, student 3 if he does not meet us he will not check homework... etc. But you can use this with other grammatical structures besides 1st conditional.

Running to the board: Have students practice running dictation. One way to play this is by placing sight words out side the class and having student bring them and placing them on the board or by having classmates dictate something and students have to write it on board. Also, teacher can have students make 2 lines and ask them to write words according to a category. For example: write all the fruits you know, or al the comedy movies you know.

Scattergories: have each group get a paper and write categories such as country, city, color, animals, etc. tell them they will start with letter M and they have to write one word for each category that starts with letter M. Do this with other letters as well.

Charades! Charades is a super fun game that can be played with any group. below I will post a few links so you can see how it works as well as another variation such as HEADS UP. These games are also APPS you can download them and keep them in your phone.

charades with Jimmy Fallon

charades with Jimmy Fallon 2

heads up with Adam Levine

Heads up with Sofia Vergara

Jeopardy or Who wants to be a Millionaire: easy game, make acategories and divide them into levels as in the picture. The smallest number (400) would be the easiest questions and the biggest number (2000) would be the most difficult question.

Enjoy these games!

Easter is around the corner!

Hi everyone! So, Easter is around the corner and the best way to celebrate it with the little ones is to do some arts and crafts!

I want to thank my friend and great teacher Pamela for suggesting these awesome ideas with which our students had so much fun.

These ease and fast crafts do no require the use of many materials, in fact we only used a handful of things such as cardboard, tissue paper, paint, and the most valuable ingredient; students creativity (the rabbit craft).

Hope these ideas are useful and happy Easter everyone!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Busy bags, so much fun!

Hi everyone. So, I want to continue with my previous post about busy folders. Today I am posting about busy bags and some other activities that can be used as file folder activities. These are great resources for children to keep them busy learning. You know what is the best of these materials? you can find them online for FREE, anyone can make them, once you laminate them, they will last FOREVER, it is also great for teachers and busy moms.

Some of the resources were taken from the following pages:

http://www.itsybitsyfun.com/
http://www.coffeecupsandcrayons.com/acts-of-kindness/
http://thisreadingmama.com/
http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/

Enjoy =)



 

 

 

This game works with little
apples that contain letters,
students have to match them

Busy Folder, Busy Student

Hi everyone! new post! woohoo. Ok, so, all of us have in our class those fabulous fast finishers. Sometimes we can get away by getting those students to help their classmates or even help the teacher. However, we can help those fast finishers and teach them to invest that little free time into learning more English, or whatever it is that you are teaching.

I am mentioning fast finishers in the post of "busy folder" since that is mostly how I use this awesome folder I made for my students. However, the busy folder can have many other uses and there are so many other variations of this teaching tool (busy folders, busy bags, file folder games) that you will be amazed. Below I posted some you tube links in order for you to see the myriad of options available  for teachers who want to create a busy folder.

Dr. Seuss busy folder (theme based busy folder)

Toddler learning folder (I used this one as the model for my busy folder)

Free Printable Preschool/Early Learning Homeschool Resources (awesome resource)

My very own busy folder is still in process of being completed. However, I have managed to include some of the most common topics I usually teach in class.

                             

     

 

Hope this is useful!