AI-generated transcript: Hello, I'm going to give you some tips, 10 tips, in fact, for how to teach an online lesson.
And so I thought I would do it like an online lesson.
So I've got 10 points.
The first point, first tip, just teach it like this.
Just start your program and you start talking.
I'm using Zoom.
Uh, but you could use, uh, what is it?
Microsoft, uh, is it meetings, um, or Apple FaceTime?
Even I do some lessons with line because some people don't, can't work, can't work out how to use zoom.
So I use line and it's perfectly fine.
You can just do this.
You talk, the other person talks, uh, for most ones it's free.
Um, at the moment, as I record this, it's free on zoom for 40 minutes.
If you run out of your 40 minutes, get them to call you back and they get another 40 minutes.
actually I'm lucky my time my lessons are 40 minutes long so it's not a problem but anyway so you just have to do this and you talk and you get used to uh the slight time delay you've lived through um coronavirus right so you know the deal it's just like this you yeah there's a little bit of you know you have to learn to to shut up and let the other person talk and give another an extra half a second otherwise you talk over each other but
practice makes perfect so that's my first point you can just use it like this and it's a perfectly good lesson especially for adults it's perfectly fine no problem second point tip number two you can record your lesson i'm recording this lesson right now and i'm going to upload it later but i'm using the zoom software all for free
um the advantage of recording it not because you can look at yourself and make making horrible mistakes but you can then send the uh the file to your students or so they can watch it the problem is it can be quite a heavy file uh quite a you know uses up a bit of memory but it's a great thing um i think you can set it so that they can record with no problem and then they feel like the students feel like they're getting extra value if they can record
uh everything that's going on and listen to it at their pleasure pleasure okay so that's number one just do it like this number two you can record it uh number three you can use a book okay this is all really really simple right if you have a book you can hold it up to the camera and if it's a simple one like this and you can get them to read it oh chip had a box right you get them to do it
um the beauty of this is you don't have to do lots of preparation and you can just hold it up to the camera and it works for simple reading right now okay that those are the very simplest things and and all of those are perfectly okay for adults um but i'm going to give you a little more useful stuff um you could use a book
right if you want them to actually read a book or a textbook um i advise getting a you can take a photograph of it with your smartphone and then upload it to your desktop or whatever you're using and then you can just share that image and it's much works much better i'll show you in a moment what i mean i've heard of some people they use a smartphone and they they film above the book or whatever and then join as if it's another member of the of the group and i just think i'm having a smartphone and this
The less tech the better.
So what I have, I happen to have all my textbooks on PDFs, but if you didn't, here's what you could do.
Look, I'm going to share.
There's a, if you go on zoom, I don't think you can see this, but on zoom, if you go down to the bottom of the screen, there's a little thing that says share screen.
I'm going to click on that share screen and I'm going to share.
What am I going to share?
Oh, I'm going to share.
I need a, I need a website.
Oh, I didn't set it up.
great okay i'm going to go to the desktop so now i'm sharing my desktop i'm going to share this what a mess you see here there's a whole bunch of stuff here on my desktop you wouldn't normally uh do this but let's see let me see i'm going to make a new window i'm going to find let's see free talk tefl look there's free talk tefl let's go in there
okay look it's the Free Talk TEFL website and you'll see when you share something you the teacher goes into this little box if you have students they would be in little boxes too so anyway everybody could be looking at this and they'll see the pointer that you are controlling now let's see this is a recent Free Talk TEFL thing let's see how about let's say i want to teach a junior high school lesson and we're going through speeches are just the first one here
I'm going to click on there and look they can see all of this this is actually from their textbook so they have this textbook at home but you could just use this you could have a group of people and they can read through do you ever give presents for special occasions blah blah blah okay great hooray
you could read through it just like you would do a textbook in face-to-face now the other thing you can do here let's say you've got some some exercises make a question about presence okay maybe they don't know what to write well you can use a tool the annotate tool and click on text tool and you can write a little message here make a question about presence do you like to give your teacher money
Right.
And you can pull that out.
And this is just using the Zoom software.
So it's not really writing that, but it's just writing it above the thing, the image that you have.
So you can see you don't actually have the, if they, they don't even have to have a textbook.
You could be using your own textbook.
If you've got a PDF of it, if you've taken a picture of it, saved it to your desktop.
Okay.
I'm going to stop the share.
okay so that's not too difficult right and all of those things are probably probably good for young students as well as adults and really adults that's all you need what i've just shown you you don't need any more than that you don't need any bells and whistles they're paying you for your ability to speak and to teach so you know just do that you don't need any special effects and backgrounds and you know just because you can doesn't mean you have to
but there is one very useful tool.
So what are we on?
So that's number one, two, three.
So number four is use a whiteboard.
Now I don't mean you can, when I first started, I had an actual thing from Dice, a little whiteboard and I'd write on there like that.
Don't do that.
If this is why I like Zoom more than Line.
Line doesn't have this.
I don't think, not yet, but Zoom has a whiteboard function and you'll find it down.
If you go to your share screen, go to whiteboard, share,
Look there's a whiteboard!
Hooray!
So if you've got difficult vocabulary um I don't know uh what we're gonna so I'm gonna write on here let's see let's write the text difficult vocabulary uh freedom
right how to spell freedom whatever um the beauty of it is you can you can prepare this before the lesson if you want to or if you haven't had time to prepare anything just open your whiteboard and start writing on it just like a real whiteboard and i think it remembers it as well if you close it and come back to it okay
so that's number four use a whiteboard um now that you've got a whiteboard let's say you're teaching children actually from now on i think all of these are really for children um except for the final point so you have to stay and watch the whole video um okay what can you do with a whiteboard just like you could use for anything for a whiteboard uh you can play hangman so you know uh they have to they have to guess the letters if they make a mistake you go up make a little hangman
You can draw.
That's my point.
If I get the draw tool.
Okay.
Okay.
Let's see.
I've got a line here.
Or what else can I do?
I can do just freehand.
I think so.
Oh no.
Has he got an A in?
No.
Has he got an O in?
No.
Oh no.
Right.
Hangman.
You know how to play hangman, right?
Right.
um it may not be politically correct isn't it having hangman you could have anything else drawing something and then when the picture is complete uh the game is over okay so that's one there let me see if i can find my eraser eraser erase okay so that's that's something you can do with kids immediately right
Okay, next, you can draw a picture.
What is it?
You can play a game like that.
Okay, you say you've got like five minutes left, you can start drawing a picture.
What's this?
Is it a motorbike?
Is it a bicycle?
What is it?
Oh, is it?
Is it something rude?
No, it's Mr. Sherriff.
Right.
You can get the kids to write as well.
You can set it so that they have the rights.
Anybody looking at it can can log in and they can start drawing a picture so you can play a game like that.
So that's another one.
OK.
Draw a picture.
Hangman.
Bingo.
How do you play bingo?
Make sure everybody has a piece of paper.
Tell them to draw a grid of three by three.
Then you write down all the words that come up in the lessons.
What have we got in today's lesson?
Freedom.
What else did I talk about?
Whiteboard, whatever words that you want to have, right?
I would suggest you have like, for example, if you have a nine, a grid of nine, like a tic-tac-toe, noughts and crosses grid, have about 12 vocabulary words.
I mean, it doesn't have to be these difficult words.
It could be anything blue, red, green, whatever the theme of the lesson is.
And then they have to write down, they choose,
nine of the twelve that you've written there in any order they want on their piece of paper and you just go through it and say okay the first word is freedom the first word is whiteboard whatever um and it's a game if you've got a class that works quite well people shouting out hey bingo bingo and really they're practicing writing words which is the whole point
Okay, that's that.
Okay, let's get out of the whiteboard.
Stop share.
Okay.
so what else can you do um these are all you may feel not very confident sharing screens and stuff at first it is a bit scary so here are some very very analog things that you can do back to just having like this face to face okay you can play three hint quiz if you've got some cards or some teaching materials i'm going to do three hint quiz um for example number one i am old number two i don't have much hair number three i am fat who am i
Not Mr. Sherriff, it's Santa!
Right?
Three hint quiz.
Just like you would do in a lesson, maybe.
Or you can use the actual facilities we've got here, like this.
I'll say, what's this?
Huh?
What is it?
Is it Japan?
Is it a map of Japan?
Is it the sun?
Get the kids to shout out.
Oh, it's an egg.
Yay.
Well done.
10 points for Sachiko, whatever.
right so that's three hint quiz uh zoom in zoom out actually zooming out works best so you start in very close and zoom out you could have any kind of card um where are we now let's see um the last point is number 10 treasure hunt tell everybody okay um whoever can come back with something brown is the winner go and they'll run off
and get away from the screen, because you don't want them staring at the screen, especially little kids, and they'll come back, and they'll come back, ah, here, Mr. Sherriff, and then they have to, it's like a show and tell, they have to say, I have something brown.
Or, you know, find something, if you're doing slightly older kids, or find something made in China, ready, go, and they have to go and find something made in China.
So they're running around their house and getting out of their seat and doing something fun, come back to the class and have to report.
That's kind of fun.
um and it's low tech and so i think it's really good that actually is 10 points right so just let me to recap just do it the basic system like this number two make recordings of it so that you can send to your students use a book or use a pdf on your screen and share it and you can write on it on the screen use the whiteboard just to write words
If you've got kids, you can play hangman, that's number five.
Number six, draw a picture and get them to draw a picture, sharing it.
Number seven, have a game of bingo if you've got a class.
Number eight, do three hint quiz.
Number nine, you can zoom out, putting something close to the camera and zooming out, right?
Number 10, show and tell or treasure hunts.
Get me something,
uh get me an animal show me an animal go and find an animal in the house either a pet or a stuffed toy or something right those are 10 things i'm going to give you a bonus and this works for adults too but but um mainly for kids uh and that's you can share videos too so this does require a bit of preparation so you have to have found or it's better if you've found the
The video on YouTube.
If you've got a video ready to go on YouTube, you can share it on here and just play a game.
So let's see, I'm going to share my screen.
I've got one that I've already prepared, which is one I use sometimes.
It's going to share this.
Hold on.
Yeah, there it is.
Let me move it up here.
Okay and you just press play just like you're watching a video so all I've done is linked to the YouTube video that I had open on a page on my desktop and we'll just press play.
You get 30 seconds for each puzzle.
Okay ready go and get your kids to shout out.
Puzzle number one.
Right what do you have to do?
Oh spot five differences and they can draw on the screen just like you can draw on the screen or you can point with your cursor.
oh there's a window here there's no window here get them shouting out the idea is that they use English right hopefully actually as long as they're having fun that's the number one if you're using English great but eventually they'll get the idea and they'll show you today okay this is for kids of course but there's no reason why you couldn't share clips uh for adults or anything on youtube if you've prepared something okay i'm going to stop the share
I hope that's helpful I kind of raced through those but you can watch it again if you want to but the point is you you know and this is just this just the surface of what you can do but you don't have to go much deeper my philosophy is that people have paid to get real English so you do as much real English face-to-face as you can
I've seen some people and they they put little avatars of themselves and they have cartoons and talking and I personally that's not my thing I think it's too much kind of overkill and my feeling is kids get enough of that anyway so but yeah that's just me yeah I'm sure you have your own way of doing things and anyway the point is I hope you can see even an old fogey like me can use zoom and online and
What does it mean for the school?
It means, well, it kept us going through lockdown when that happened.
We just got everybody onto Zoom.
And still there are about 10% of our students are online only.
So thanks to Zoom and using this online system, I've got 10% more students than I would have had, and they would have quit probably.
That's just, of course, as I say,
scratching the surface and if you made your whole school all about zoom or all about online yeah i don't know it's possible okay uh that's enough that's enough right there will be no homework on this but if you need to rewind watch again okay i hope that's helpful to you let me know in the comments if it was um and uh good luck
been online and in fact you could probably tell me where I'm going wrong if you if you know more about it than I okay thank you see you right I'm just going to end this and it should should be done okay
35. How do you teach an online English lesson?: 10 low-tech, no preparation tips to get started