This year I started teaching via skype for the first time and have been doing it for about 6 months now. Although, I still feel pretty much like a novice in online education, there are couple of tips + resources I found useful along the way. If you're a skype rookie as well, maybe you'll find them useful.
1. Have a headset. It seems obvious, but many people forget about it. As a result your students will hear everything: from your typing to your roommates coughing and walking.
2. Think of the ways you can use the camera. Once I was really surprised when I heard that some skype teachers don't use cameras. Sure, if you have a speaking lesson with an advance auditory learner, that may work. However, in the rare moments when I switch off the camera (to share the screen for example), I feel the change in the communication right away, it becomes slower and less smooth. Perhaps, it's because both I and my students are visual learners, but in general I feel the image is a necessary communication channel in skype. I'm still working though on incorporating gestures and mimes into my classes more, there is little space I can use for it and the little time lag can make it almost unintelligible.
3. Share screens. You would probably discover this option pretty soon and there are many ways to use it. I share screens mainly for demonstrating pictures, so my next advice would be to build a digital library of images and make sure they are all high resolution/large pictures (you can set it as a requirement in google search).
4. We use a usual textbook, but sometimes there is a need for extra material. There are couple of ways you can present the material. If you take a page from another book, you can use pdf splitter to extract one or more pages and pdf merger to put them together. Skitch - Evernote product - also proved to be a useful tool. With Skitch you can make a snapshot of anything you have on your screen (on and offline) and save it as an image. Then you can add words, symbols, arrows, crop and rotate it. That works well if you want to take a picture or only one exercise from a book. Recently I discovered a Chrome extension - Awesome Screenshot - that offers basically the same function online.
5. Online editing tools like Google Docs are you friends. I found out right away that checking writing in the class is much more time-consuming than offline. So I quickly introduced my students to Google Docs and got rid of one problem. One of my students keeps putting her writing in one document, which I think is quite ingenious - you can track your progress and keep an eye on the previous mistake as you create new text.
6. The chat is invaluable. First of all, it clears many comprehension questions during the lesson. If a student missed a word or simply does not understand what you say, just type it in (+ reading practice). Then, there is error correction. Write up the mistakes you hear and discuss them after the speaking exercises. It will also do you a good service later if you want to make an exercise based on student's mistakes or track his/her progress. Most importantly, it's a reliable record of your lessons which you can use for various purposes.
There are still a lot to learn and find out like
1. Have a headset. It seems obvious, but many people forget about it. As a result your students will hear everything: from your typing to your roommates coughing and walking.
2. Think of the ways you can use the camera. Once I was really surprised when I heard that some skype teachers don't use cameras. Sure, if you have a speaking lesson with an advance auditory learner, that may work. However, in the rare moments when I switch off the camera (to share the screen for example), I feel the change in the communication right away, it becomes slower and less smooth. Perhaps, it's because both I and my students are visual learners, but in general I feel the image is a necessary communication channel in skype. I'm still working though on incorporating gestures and mimes into my classes more, there is little space I can use for it and the little time lag can make it almost unintelligible.
3. Share screens. You would probably discover this option pretty soon and there are many ways to use it. I share screens mainly for demonstrating pictures, so my next advice would be to build a digital library of images and make sure they are all high resolution/large pictures (you can set it as a requirement in google search).
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| Sometimes it got interesting :) |
4. We use a usual textbook, but sometimes there is a need for extra material. There are couple of ways you can present the material. If you take a page from another book, you can use pdf splitter to extract one or more pages and pdf merger to put them together. Skitch - Evernote product - also proved to be a useful tool. With Skitch you can make a snapshot of anything you have on your screen (on and offline) and save it as an image. Then you can add words, symbols, arrows, crop and rotate it. That works well if you want to take a picture or only one exercise from a book. Recently I discovered a Chrome extension - Awesome Screenshot - that offers basically the same function online.
5. Online editing tools like Google Docs are you friends. I found out right away that checking writing in the class is much more time-consuming than offline. So I quickly introduced my students to Google Docs and got rid of one problem. One of my students keeps putting her writing in one document, which I think is quite ingenious - you can track your progress and keep an eye on the previous mistake as you create new text.
6. The chat is invaluable. First of all, it clears many comprehension questions during the lesson. If a student missed a word or simply does not understand what you say, just type it in (+ reading practice). Then, there is error correction. Write up the mistakes you hear and discuss them after the speaking exercises. It will also do you a good service later if you want to make an exercise based on student's mistakes or track his/her progress. Most importantly, it's a reliable record of your lessons which you can use for various purposes.
There are still a lot to learn and find out like
- how to make reading tasks more fun
- is there a listening tool where both a teacher and a student can listen to a track
- and a video tool like that
- which online board is the best (there are so many) and do I need it
- how to perfect communication with a student outside class
