These are free digital tools I recommend for online ESL/EFL teachers in their language classes.

You can use digital tools to create engaging and interactive content. You can also use them to provide feedback to students and track progress. Most important, you can help students to connect with other language learners and to enjoy learning. I was struck by this comment from a student: “I continued to learn Spanish because I made some Spanish friends and found them quite fun.” The two words “friends” and “fun” stayed with me and become part of my foundation pedagogy.

Yes, a teacher must teach vocabulary, grammar, reading and writing skills. But when every online language teacher does that, how do I differentiate myself? That was the key question I asked myself when I set up my language teaching business. I needed to tell a parent why my approach was different in a few words. That positioning question took me four months to answer. Eventually, I landed on the brand “Creative Chinese Club”. Creative to make learning language fun, Club to connect students to be friends. The use of digital/tech tools is to support this teaching mission and pedagogy.

Although the club teaches Chinese, the method and tool recommendations can be applied just as well to online teaching of English and other languages.

Here are some (free) digital tools I use to make learning a foreign language fun and collaborative.

Before my class, each student is set a challenge to create a drawing on a topic to be discussed in class. To inspire them, I use Whiteboard Miro to display examples done by previous students. See the example below, with drawings for covers of ‘My Story’ books.

With the free version of Miro, you can create 3 boards. If you want to continue creating new boards, you can still stay at the free level, but your previous boards become view-only.

The paid version of Miro costs US$30 per month, to edit more boards and invite members.

Alternatives to Miro include ClickUp and Conceptboard. Each has different features and pricing. Most have free versions, so you can try out with your students. You can read more details and choose one suitable to your teaching purpose and budget via this link – https://clickup.com/blog/miro-alternatives/

Listening and speaking skills are essential to gaining fluency in a foreign language. It is important for students to practice these skills outside of online class time. A great way is to connect the students with their native peers. This not only gives students an immersive language environment but also helps build cultural connections and friendships. Video is the ideal medium to engage students and provide ‘ear training’.

Flip is a video-centered social platform I’ve explored.  It is a completely free Microsoft product. Users need to sign up for the platform to upload videos and engage with each other using video as a medium.

My students watch videos made by native peers so that they can hear the authentic pronunciation and sentence formation. They can respond by making their own videos talking about the same topic.

Videos made by native peers are subtitled with highlighted areas.

Flip requires users to sign up in order to view videos and this can create friction. An alternative is Trello.

Trello does not require signup to view. However, in order to respond or upload your own message (picture, video, text), you need to create your account. The comment and reply buttons of Trello really make social interaction easy and engaging.

The free Trello plan provides you with unlimited personal boards (viewable only by a single individual) and 10 boards (projects) per workspace.

One tech area that will have a huge impact on teaching and learning or education, in general, is Artificial Intelligence. Some amazing resources (many currently made free to the public) could transform education.

Dear Studio is a magic tool to help teachers design our lesson plans or websites. If you are worried about copyright issues using images from others, now you can create your own images, defining the topic, style, size of image you want.

This is an image I use for my website homepage. I simply typed the phrase ‘concept art of a teacher with students of the world with bright color’ to Dream Studio to generate this image. The intellectual ownership of this image belongs to me.

You can use Dream Studio to generate 200 images for free.

This link provides 13 AI art generators (free and paid)

https://www.codingem.com/best-ai-art-generators/

Many of us use stories to teach a language. Automated story writing presents both a huge opportunity and a challenge in education, including online language teaching.

Story-Machines.net is a website empowered by AI technology to generate stories (best in English, but it will generate stories in other languages). The following story is generated by the website when I typed in the title ‘tech tools to engage online ESL learners’

You could use this tool in class to compare the writing by AI and the writing by your ESL/EFL students. Or ask your students to critique and improve a story written by AI.  Or students and AI can co-write a story, taking turns to write. Try adding some words to the end of a story created by story-machines.net, then click CREATE again.

Tech tools, in some ways, are like the genie in the lamp. Once released, it shows great power. But we need to use this power with caution. These are the Dos and Don’ts in using digital tools in teaching and learning.

Do: let tech serve pedagogy

Very often, we might get bogged down by the tool itself and overlook the goal – pedagogy. Every tool, tech, prop, and flashcard we use should serve only two goals – good learner experience and teaching effectiveness. If there are other non-digital tools that do this better, let’s use those. Even if they might not come with hype or a fancy name. Stay true – enhance learning.

Do: remember the ethics

There are many ethics to consider in the digital space, for example, data privacy and social media protocols. As online language teachers, we also bear the responsibility to provide a safe environment for our students.

Join our digital course ‘From Good to Great, Level Up Your Teaching Business’ to empower you to develop a sustainable and successful independent teaching career. Read our course page to find out more.

Having obstacles launching your independent teaching path? Book my 1-1 business coaching via the link.

There are two ways for you to enhance your earnings as a private teacher:  increase your hourly rate and/or extend your teaching hours. If you already have your own students, the most effective way is to develop a long-term relationship with the students, so they keep coming back to your classes.

This article suggests a Trigger, Action, Reward, Track framework to help you continuously engage with your students. It starts with parents and when you get students involved, the model starts to work. While your students learn to form a healthy learning habit, you continue to engage them with learning. Win-win! This framework is based on the Hook model developed by Nir Eyal.

The Hook Model was developed by Nir Eyal who worked in the video gaming and advertising industries . Based on his experience with these industries, he wrote ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products ‘. The Hook Model describes a user’s interactions with a product during four phases:

• Trigger: a trigger to begin using the product

• Action: an action to satisfy the trigger

• Reward: a variable reward for the action,

• Investment: and some type of investment that, ultimately, makes the product more valuable to the user.

As the users go through these phases, they build habits in the process.

I have modified the model to suit the learning and teaching context while minimising the potential addictive downside of this model.

Concept:

Let’s start by understanding what triggers your student to take your lessons.

It’s most likely induced by an external trigger. Maybe the child’s language exam result isn’t ideal, or the parents want the child to speak a language as well as a neighbouring child, or a friend recommended your teaching to his/her parent, or the parents saw an advertisement about learning a new language.

It’s important to notice that at this stage, the trigger is external, which works as a stimulus leading to step 2 – action

Example:

Some teachers share their examples below (these examples are provided by members of an ESL teacher Facebook community); do you find these familiar?

• ‘My student came to my class because she wants to attend a foreign university. (external trigger: educational goal)’

• ‘My student came to my class because his mother was unhappy with his English assessment results. (external triggers: bad grade, maternal consequence.)’

• ‘My student came to class because he wants to improve his understanding of the material in his IB world school. Internal trigger: learning makes him feel excited and happy external: improves overall scores in school’

Exercise:

This is a simple exercise you can do: write down answers to this question and share them in the comment box if you’d like:

My student _______ came to my class because ______________

Concept:

If parents feel enough motivation, they will take the next action. If you are teaching independently, there is a lot you can design to make their actions easy and valuable.

Here are three aspects to make things easy for the parents:

• Time effort: can you make the action straightforward?
• Money effort: perhaps you can offer free add-ons?
• Technology effort: choose a technology the parent is familiar with (email, WeChat, Facebook, WhatsApp)

To make the action valuable, you could offer

1. A 10-minute free language assessment session
2. An invitation for an open class to ‘taste’ your teaching and interact with other children and parents
3.  A free group Q&A session to answer some common questions on language learning
4. You can show detailed examples of how your teaching brought results.

These interactive sessions will help you understand your future students and achieve step 3 – reward

Exercise:

This is a simple exercise you can do: Write down some ideas about what actions you can offer parents when their motivation is ready.

Concept:

Now you have an opportunity to make learning rewarding for your students.

Reward means different things for children: some of them like animals such as dinosaurs; some like songs or quizzes. You can make some props and show these props every time you see a desirable behaviour.

By finding out what interests your students, you can design the right rewards for a ‘right’ behaviour. These behaviours can be being willing to make mistakes or being willing to talk or listen.

Giving rewards is a great way to engage students. To educate students, we need to help them track progress which I will address in step 4.

Exercise:

This is a simple exercise you can do: write down answers to this question and share in the comment box if you’d like:

My student ______ likes ______________ so I can make a reward such as ______________

Concept:

Are you familiar with the reward cards from Starbucks/McCafe? Or the loyalty cards from airlines? These are ways designed to encourage and reward repeated behaviours.

We can put on our teaching hats and reward students for repeated learning.

Design a learning journey for your students and help them to set personal goals and track progress. The more they invest in their own learning, the more rewarding the while process becomes for them.

You can make learning trackable by encouraging students to have a learning journal. You can make learning visible by giving out progress stickers for their learning journals. You can make learning fun by giving students personalised stickers (their favourite food, favourite animal)

Exercise:

This is a simple exercise you can do: write down answers to this question and share in the comment box if you’d like:

The learning goal for student ______ is ______________ , ______________ and ______________

Gamification is a popular approach for K-12 education. One example is Duolingo which did a superb design job in making language learning fun. As someone who also works in the cultural tourism industry, I often feel we educators can benefit from interacting with people in the gaming, entertainment, and tourism industry and apply user engagement methods in an educational setting.

The beauty of this HOOK model is that through step-by-step design, we can (hopefully) manage to convert a student’s external motivation into internal motivation so the incentive becomes intrinsic, and learning becomes a habit.

• To make some exercises and help YOUR students form healthy learning habits, you can submit a request for the Hook model for educator exercise book below.

• To read the book in full details, you can purchase the book via the link.
• To invest in your independent teaching career, you can join our digital course ‘From Good to Great, Level Up Your Teaching Business’ to empower you to develop a sustainable and successful independent teaching career.

We often hear the statement “choose your teaching niche”. But to build a successful teaching business, we need to go beyond that. We need to make sure we are the best person to address a particular and essential problem for our clients at the right time. It also must be profitable so that it is a sustainable career.

To do that, we need to (1) Have a thorough understanding of our unique strength (2) Have a thorough understanding of our client’s essential needs. (3) Match our strength with clients’ needs to figure out our best niche.

In this article, I will start by addressing why ‘choose your niche isn’t enough. Afterward, I will explain how locating your best niche helps your long-term success and elaborate on the three-step process to facilitate you to figure out your best-suited teaching niche.

Source of image: https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photography-white-puzzle-piece-yellow-background-three-pieces-image39279102

“Choosing your niche” should be a great idea for an online educator but why often than not, it does not work for your teaching business? These are some examples I heard

Example 1: “I help my student to improve their accents, but I can’t find students.”

Issue: this is still quite broad and not specific enough. There is still a lack of client understanding – which kind of students in which condition will seek to improve their accents and what is their motivation.

Example 2: “I help actors to have an English accent, but I am not paid.”

Issue: if your students don’t have the means or budget to pay for your teaching, you are teaching but not running a business.  This does not create a sustainable business.

Example 3: “I have been a university lecturer in history for 20 years, but I got into teaching toddler English with online platforms due to the 2020 global pandemic. Now I want to go independent. “

Issue: there is a potential mismatch between your strength and your clients’ needs. It is a niche but not the right match.

In summary, to build your success, you need to find a niche that suits your professional life strategically and a career opportunity that suits your lifestyle sustainably.

While making the choice, you need to position yourself to be suitable (to solve your student’s needs), irreplaceable (you are the best one to help with their problem), and make this path sustainable.

Suitable

When you make the right choice, you are suitable to help your clients/students to solve a problem and to meet their learning goals. Due to your experience and passion, you will already have the right subject knowledge, curriculum, personal skills to serve the need.

This compatibility makes your transition from working with platforms to working independently much easier. We will make all sorts of mistakes when we launch our own business. But your clients are much more likely to stay with you and tolerate glitches if they find your skills compatible with their needs. That will make your independent teaching journey so much smoother and enjoyable.

The further you develop the right skill and network in the area, the better reputation you will enjoy. So instead of committing a huge amount of time and money in sales and marketing, you will attract the right clients much more effectively.

Irreplaceable

Let us take this example.

A Brazilian businessman is trying to relocate this family to live in the US for a year. He is in the export-import trading business, and he has a daughter who is 10 years old. The purpose of moving to the US is really to give his daughter language and culture exposure.

You are an ESL tutor based in the US who speaks English and Portuguese. You have taught English in Brazil and therefore have a decent understanding of their culture. Your family runs a trading business, so you understand the basic language of business. You have a good understanding of the US education system as you have worked with public schools.

Another ESL tutor is a generalist with the right qualification. But between you and the generalist, who do you trust this Brazilian businessman would choose to work with? To serve that Portuguese-speaking business owner who is considering giving his child a language and cultural experience in the US, you are irreplaceable. Due to your previous background, you become indispensable.

Sustainable

For everything to be sustainable, you need to make sure your niche represents a profitable business opportunity, an opportunity that fits your own lifestyle.

If your students love your lessons but they don’t have the means to pay for it, it is a hobby, a social mission rather than a business proposition. Therefore, it is useful to reach your clients when they have budgeted their time and financial resources to learn.

If it takes so much of your time that you get burned out or you don’t have time to spend with your own family and friends, that won’t work long term. Therefore, it is very reasonable to ring fence the time and resources you can commit to building this business, this career path.

Focusing on the right niche helps you to build your teaching business effectively. Because instead of throwing your time and resources everywhere, you have a goal to aim at.

The key to figuring out the best niche is to find where your unique strength and client’s essential needs match. There are three steps: (1) understand your strength (2) understand your client’s essential need (3) match your strength with your client’s need

Step 1 – Understand your strength

This is the step to do your own inventory check, to review and reflect on your experience and celebrate your achievements. We will go through a process to pack your teaching treasure bag so you can step back and realise your unique strengths and assets. Please read a separate blog ‘A step-by-step guide: how to create a treasure bag for your independent teaching’.

Step 2 – Understand your client’s needs

This is the step to understand your client’s needs and make a judgment on what are some essential needs and what are some nice-to-have wants. We will go through a process to create user profiles for your clients. Please read a separate blog ‘A step-by-step guide: how to create user profiles for your independent teaching’

Step 3 – Match your strength with your client’s needs

This is the step to put your treasure bag and your client’s user profiles alongside each other, to make a judgment, a choice of who do you serve, and what problems you choose to solve for your clients. Our digital course ‘ Build a Successful Online Teaching Path’ will go through the process with you, by listing three criteria to make that decision.

Join our digital course ‘From Good to Great, Level Up Your Teaching Business’ to empower you to develop a sustainable and successful independent teaching career. Read our course page to find out more.

Having obstacles launching your independent teaching path? Book my 1-1 business coaching via the link.

Teachers, Be Fearless!

You have been teaching students online via platforms. Now you are ready to teach independently. One of the key success factors to be an independent teacher is your thorough understanding of your own strength and assets. In this blog, I will share how to pack your teaching treasure bag – a systematic way for you to do an inventory check, to celebrate your assets and achievements.  This will be a solid foundation to build your success in independent teaching. I will also give some concrete examples so that you can create your own.

Your teaching treasure bag collects the qualification, skills and networks accumulated from your personal background and professional experience. Each element in the bag might look disconnected at times. But the real magic comes when you connect and combine these elements and come up with suitable solutions to serve your target clients.

Your teaching treasure bag shows your expertise and passion. It is one important way to guide your future direction, to build your independent teaching path. Please look at the treasure bag template. We will get to details of the template in the ‘How to pack your teaching treasure bag’ part.

Treasure Bag Template

It takes time to reflect on our achievements and review our strengths. So why do we do that instead of just jumping into the independent teaching trajectory? The reason is doing so helps us understand our value, our passion and helps us discover our best-suited niche.

• Understand your value

When we are working with platforms or companies, we move from class to class, job to job without having the necessary time and space to step back and look at the unique path we have taken. Not having a holistic view of the knowledge, expertise, and network we have built in the past makes us undervalue ourselves and miss the right opportunity in the future.

• Understand your passion

Packing our treasure bag also helps us to uncover our passion and motivation. Why did I choose to work with company A instead of company B, what was really driving my decisions? It is money or my desire to help others communicate, or my love for interacting with children, or my preference not to deal with administrative tasks? Understanding our decision-making mechanism in the past will be valuable in predicting what will motivate us in the future. When we know where our heart is, we will know how to use our heads.

• Discover your best-suited niche

The key to figuring out the best niche is to find where your unique strength and client’s essential needs match. There are three steps: (1) understand your strength (2) understand your client’s essential need (3) match your strength with your client’s need. (Click to read the blog- Build a Successful Online Teaching Career/Business/Path – Figure Out Your Best Niche). So this is the first step to discovering your best-suited niche.

Source of image: https://www.behance.net/gallery/129154179/Hints-From-GradesFixer

Now it is time for us to go through the teaching treasure bag template so you can create your own soon.

The row in the template captures your past experiences:

• Personal background: Where did you grow up? Where have you lived? What is your first language? Where do you live now? Do you have parenting skills that are relevant in an educational environment?
• Education: do you have qualifications in education or the subject area you are teaching? Do you have other educations that will help you in your teaching career, such as psychology, communication, etc?
• Job: Have you worked with brick-and-mortar schools? What other online platforms you have worked with? What is your non-education-related work background? Don’t discount these as they can be very powerful if combined with your teaching experience.
• Business: Have you had experience running your own business? This can be potentially very relevant in your teaching niche. For example, if you have set up your own business while teaching independently, this can be very valuable to entrepreneurs who want to improve their English for business.

The column in the template captures the assets and strengths you accumulated from your personal and professional background:

• Qualification: Your certification or qualification to prove your training and credentials.
• Skills: Skills are broken down into Language and Cultural skills (language one speaks and culture one is familiar with), education skills (content, teaching, parenting), business skills, and others.
• Network: Networks are broken down into Clients, Colleagues (peers), and Collaborators (curriculum supplier, training institutes, influencer, mentor, mentee, etc.)  These networks can be sources of your client, curriculum supplier, knowledge, and further development. A good quality network empowers you to grow continuously.

Please find the teaching treasure bag by teacher Paige. That was her first go with the template and I hope that gives you some good foundation to create a teaching treasure bag of your own.

Our digital course ‘Build a Successful Independent Teaching Path’ empowers you to develop a sustainable and successful independent teaching career. Please register your interest.

Having obstacles launching your independent teaching path? Book my 1-1 business coaching via the link.

Teachers, Be Fearless!