Falling in love with online teaching
Anybody who knows me, my students included, also knows that I never really enjoyed using technology beyond sending e-mails, browsing the internet and communicating on social media. As far as I can remember, I used to say that online teaching is nothing for me and that I can’t imagine working like that. Well, (wo)man proposes but God (and coronavirus) disposes…
In the past few weeks I’ve participated in 5 online webinars (I’m planning to write more on those later on) that provided a lot of useful information on online teaching and how to transition to it. I also taught my first few online lessons this week and I’m full of ideas and impressions. First of all, I have to admit that I was totally wrong about online lesson. Contrary to what I used to think, I find online teaching fun and totally equal to face-to-face lessons (provided it’s done properly, of course).
I’ve already found out that with the right tools you can do all the same things using Skype or Zoom as you can do face to face. You can converse, work with your favourite books and textbooks, do all sorts of grammar and vocabulary exercises. You can even do listening activities, watch videos together and play interactive games. I’m excited about Google Classroom, where you can store all your classroom materials, assign homework, correct it and send it back. It can be convenient, so well organized and very efficient. How could I not know about it?
I tried to put together all the benefits of online teaching & learning that I’ve discovered so far. Here they are:
- it’s convenient – you don’t have to travel anywhere. You can have lessons in your office, study or living room and still wear pyjamas – well, at least on the bottom but be careful in case you need to jump up unexpectedly 🙂
- it’s flexible – you can schedule your lessons basically any time you need/want to;
- it’s fun – for some reason I find speaking on web cam a lot more fun. When you’re getting used to having online lessons, especially in these weird times, there are a lot of things that are kind of unusual because they’re not normally present at the lesson, like the stuff around you, your kids/pets/partner and so on, and all this may create unexpected situations that are both funny and give you extra reasons to practise the language;
- it’s teaching you to be more independent – especially in asynchronous online learning, it’s the student who needs to be proactive and work independently with the materials their teacher provides;
- it’s more productive – this is not only my feeling so far, but many teachers I talked to (who already have a long-term experience with online teaching) confirm that they and their students can focus much better on what’s going on and they can do more during the class.
Of course, there are possible drawbacks too, namely concerning technology and equipment. Unexpected technical glitches may occur, there may be internet outage or power blackout but we teachers are used to improvising and we should always have a plan B anyway, right? Online tuition surely has its particularities and I know there are many aspects that I need to master. However, there are so many fun options worth exploring and I feel like a beginner student, full of enthusiasm and eager to find out more. And if you are a student who’s hesitant about starting online lessons, all I can say is “Give it a try!“. You may be just as pleasantly surprised as I was and still am 🙂
Photo taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @grahamstanley, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/