I often get emails from teachers worried that online tools and resources are going to replace them. My opinion is that this won’t happen anytime soon. Additionally, we shouldn’t see these resources as competition but, instead, as potentially useful tools to help us better help our learne... The post Three Tools to Help You Teach English Pronunciation (and How to Do This Asynchronously) appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

Joining Teaching ESL Online in this latest interview is Andrea Giordano from ESL Basics. Andrea and I recently collaborated on a video together and, after looking at her website and YouTube channel, I reached out to ask if she would like to share her online teaching story with us. In the interview, ... The post Andrea Giordano on Teaching Online and Selling Products appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

Jason R. Levine is an English teacher who travels the world performing songs he has written specifically for English learners. In the interview, we talk about how he got started with making music, why he was nervous about putting his songs out there, what he likes most about doing workshops around t... The post Jason R. Levine: Teaching English through Music, Travelling, and Helping Learners Do More in English appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

One of the biggest challenges for teachers moving online is finding the time to get things moving. Shayna, from Espresso English, shares how she built an online business while working in other positions in this latest interview. In addition to sharing how she made the transition into going full-time... The post Shayna Oliveira Shares Her Story of How She Built Espresso English in Her Spare Time appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

If you are an online teacher, you will already know the importance of giving things away for free. This includes articles/ebooks you have written, videos you have made, trial lessons, and your time. But how much should you offer for free? How much time should you spend helping others without payment... The post Free vs Paid: How to Find the Right Balance as an Online Teacher appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

It’s easy to go plugin-crazy after installing WordPress. Plugins add functionality to your site and a lot of them do really cool things. But my criteria for a plugin is that it has to be useful and it has to be secure. If it doesn’t help your site do what you want it to do, don’t a... The post Three Useful WordPress Plugins for Your Teaching Website appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

An exciting preview of things to come. A building of anticipatition for what will doubtlessly be a game changing product. A frank appraisal of the eLearning industry. All these themes were on display as Verdom IT Projects’ David Roberts took to the stage and announced coming of Geenio at the 2013 Silicon Valley Innovation Summit. As detailed in the presentation, the eLearning Industry is in a bit of a paradox: 86% of businesses already use a one type of learning program, or another, but an overall 33% dissatisfaction rate amongst current users. Geenio will be Verdom IT Projects’ solution to the Industry paradox by being mobile, gamified and socialized. Following the presentation, many interested parties quizzed the Verdom IT Projects team about participating in the upcoming beta version of Geenio. With so much positive feedback, it’s only natural for Verdom IT Projects to conclude that enthusiasm for the Geenio brand is growing along with anticipation for the good things it will do within the eLearning Industry.

There are a couple of things that almost everyone knows about the LMS world. With the continuous development over the past 20 years, LMS vendors have produced a highly customized set of solutions, each of those leading in its respective field. There is preferable LMS software almost in every industry from the pharmaceutical and healthcare area to the financial sector. It is no surprise that the LMS products currently available suit the needs of every particular industry they were crafted for. However, in the rush to fine-tune the programs to meet a broad range of customer requests, there was one thing that was completely missed by software vendors: the qualitative leap of technology in the last few decades. As a result, the vast majority of learning management systems has an outdated user interface pushing users back to those times when using a computer was quite a skill. Shocking as it may appear, it has become the norm to have outdated, professional tools that are not user friendly. How could you expect an expert in the field to be satisfied with such tools after day-to-day use of Gmail, Dropbox, Flipboard and Evernote? Nowadays, it is fairly reasonable to demand the same level of usability from all the instruments we use in our work. While developing Geenio we followed the golden rule, which is: "craft the tool you are going to use yourself". With that said, we set an attractive and easy-to-use product as the main objective. We believe this approach ensures a seamless experience for product users and guarantees they will be glad to use it again to achieve their professional goals. Let’s be honest - we look at the cover when we first see something new. And this very first impression builds the foundation of our perception of that particular thing. Having that in mind, we want our product to be as addictive as Porsche or Apple. People use Google every day, with the trust that Google will find the information they are looking for even if they make mistakes and typos in their search queries. We may not even remember the exact statement we are searching for, but we rely on the search engine to complete our thoughts or at the very least, to provide a hint when we start typing the word. This is what we have come to expect from a modern LMS platform. And this is a very natural demand, because searching within LMS is just as important as searching globally. Geenio’s internal search, which is currently in development, already uses the best practices borrowed from the leading search providers. It uses the key words from the phrase you typed in to find course materials, users, comments, areas and tags which contain the information you are searching for. It is absolutely true to say that one cannot overvalue search and filtering abilities in our supersaturated informational sphere. LMS vendors keep tuning their solutions to meet the needs of as many customers as possible and are completely ignoring common trends which still have an impact on e-learning. Among them, gamification, that allows motivate students and give them immediate feedback to their action. Social functions, that gained popularity with the advent of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Mobility, which has become especially relevant due to the increased popularity of tablets and smartphones.Our goal is not about creating yet another LMS shaped for a particular industry. Our mission is to provide a world-class LMS that not only has the LMS features everyone is used to, but also those things we love about other modern Internet services. For instance, many vendors say that one may export a course created with an LMS to an HTML5 for viewing it on an iPad, but as practice shows the result may be significantly different from what is expected. Geenio works on tablets out of the box without any need to export a single byte of information. We want people not just view courses, but also create them with tablets they have just the same way they do on desktops and laptops without any limitations. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have become irreplaceable sources of information and platforms of communication. And we encourage people to share their success the way they are used to and benefit from integrating all the popular social features of those sites. We are still in the process of active development, designing the best way to streamline even more facilities to make your education process successful. We’ll be glad to see you at our official Geenio presentation at DevLearn 2013 in Las Vegason October 23-25th. Also, you could try using Geenio on your own, by signing up for the beta program on our website. We are going to lift the curtain up soon, stay tuned!

Geenio at DevLearn 2013 Late in October 2013 we visited the fabulous Las Vegas for DevLearn 2013. This was our first experience being a software vendor exhibitor at such a big E-Learning event. Let’s be honest - DevLearn is big, and so were our plans for the expo. We didn’t go there to sell our product; instead, we wanted to talk to people. We wanted to listen to E-Learning professionals and understand what they need to be successful in their job. Our mission was to get certain about which tool they needed so we could produce such a tool. In our booth we demonstrated the product we had at that time, shared our vision of a comprehensive and yet easy to use online tool for training course creation. And our potential users actually gave it a try and put their hands on a demo. We were really glad to see people accepting features of Geenio with excitement. It’s always a pleasure to see that something you worked really hard on is appreciated and distinguished as unique. For instance, our guests were astonished by our seamless and intuitive course authoring ability on an iPad. Not only were our visitors surprised, we were overwhelmed too. Shocking as it may appear, people still require SCORM in their LMSes. Even though Experience API (Tin Can API) is being actively developed and promoted, E-Learning professionals want SCORM support. That’s definitely a thing we will be looking at in the near future. Another unexpected but pleasant thing was that our potential customers asked for pricing despite our upright and explicit statement that the product was not ready. We realize that the first impression is very important as it is the thing all further relation to the software is built upon, that’s why we better postpone a bit the date of starting worldwide sales for the sake of providing a complete, solid and comfortable tool of a high quality. Long story short, DevLearn 2013 helped us to realize we were moving in the right direction. The feedback we got gave us the strength to move forward and work hard to release Geenio sooner. Stay tuned and you won’t be waiting long for good news about Geenio!

On October,24th the Geenio expo team had the opportunity to share several hints and best practices for creating attractive online courses with DevLearn 2013 attendees.Despite the limiting technical issues during the session, attendees were able to see how to apply several pedagogical methodologies in practice. You can view the slides used for presentation here. Later on we will publish video as well.