Teaching Online
I am now teaching English exclusively online, having decided not to renew my teaching contract with the school I have worked at for the past 5 years.
During the last year of classroom teaching I was using an Interactive Whiteboard (IWB). This wonderful system enabled me to prepare all my classes at home and then present them to the students on the huge screen at the front of the class. This made the lessons extremely dynamic and fast-paced. No more problems with student behaviour – they were simply too busy to mess around!
Because I could incorporate video, sound, animation and more, and could layer my slides to reveal information as it was elicited from the students, the classes were engaging and enjoyable. The results in the final exams proved that the students had made measurably better progress than in earlier years when I did not have the IWB.
While I was teaching the students’ focus was on the screen and I, the teacher, became a guide and a source of answers to questions of pronunciation, minor points of grammar and vocabulary. The well-constructed slides I had produced at home worked so well at explaining the point I was trying to teach that I stopped being the center of the classroom.
Standing on the periphery, watching the efforts I had invested in preparing the lesson pay dividends, it occurred to me that I no longer needed to be physically present in the classroom. I realised that with a video link to the classroom I could be anywhere on the planet and still deliver the same lesson. I could just as easily answer questions over a video link as I could from my place in the classroom.
It occurred to me that remote teaching was the future of English teaching and that was when I decided to leave the classroom and see if such a brave new world could be made reality.
I already had my website, www.Linguaspectum.com that had been conceived as a way of giving one-to-one classes through VOIP, but had developed into something much more over the years without actually being used to teach using VOIP. It had become a way for teachers to create their own crosswords and hangman games. It had become one of the biggest collections of quotations on the Internet, in English and Spanish. It had been providing students with timed activities to test their language skills. It had not been put to its original purpose, mainly because I had my reservations about teaching over the phone, which is about all that VOIP really offered.
Recent developments in the VOIP field have changed things dramatically. Giving a lesson over the Internet using a system such as Skype amounts to little more than a conversation class. I wanted something more. I wanted to be able to teach my students in the same way I could teach them in the classroom. I had become familiar with lots of new technology during my IWB year, and discovered that I could use the exact same technology with the latest version of Skype.
The new version of Skype has screen sharing capabilities. Other addons to Skype allow IWB facilities through which both the teacher and the student can write on the same screen at the same time, while talking to one another as though in the same room.
With this breakthrough, I realised that my classroom teaching days were over and that this new way of teaching was the way forward not just for me but for all English teachers, and possibly all teachers, in the future.
You can see what I’m working on at my website, www.linguaspectrum.com.
All I need now is some students!
Posted under Lifestyle, Society, Teaching, Technology
This post was written by Richard on July 24, 2009
