When you have your own online teaching business, things can get a little hectic. There are lessons to teach, marketing to be done, admin to be taken care of, planning, strategizing, advertising, posting, connecting, and whole bunch of other things to spend your time on. And sometimes, you just sit t... The post Organizing Your Time As an Online Teacher: What to Focus on and How to Get Things Done appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

I was introduced to Zoom a couple of years ago from James Heywood at Off2Class. I’ve used it myself when I experimented with group lessons in 2014, and I have noticed that more online teachers are using this software to deliver their lessons. In the video below, I talk about the difference fea... The post A Review of Zoom.us for Teaching Online Lessons appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

In this post, I interview my friend Stephen Mayeaux over at ESLHipHop.com. Stephen started his blog after his experience teaching an elective course at UC Davis. His main focus at the university was academic preparation, but in his elective, he was free to do something different. This is when he sta... The post Hip Hop, Making Connections, and Online Courses: An Interview With Stephen Mayeaux appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

The following is a guest post from Paul Mains… As any online teacher can tell you, using the Internet to teach English comes with a host of benefits. You can work from home, giving you the flexibility to choose your own hours. If you so please, you can even continue working while traveling the... The post Utilizing Pop Culture in Online Lessons: Guest Post by Paul Mains appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

In this latest interview, I speak to Gabby Wallace about teaching online. Gabby has a very successful YouTube channel, co-founded a popular podcast, and has created various online courses for her English learners. We discuss the above and much more in our interview below. Hope you enjoy it: What We ... The post Gabby Wallace on Teaching Online, Youtube, Podcasts, and Online Courses appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

One of the biggest frustrations of teaching English is when your learners don’t do anything outside of class. When a learner starts taking lessons, they say the right things and seem motivated. But this initial enthusiasm usually disappears after a few weeks. I feel that as teachers, part of o... The post Four Ways to Get Your English Learners to Do More appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

What would you do if Facebook deleted your group with over 120,000 English learners? That happened to Real Life English (RLE), and one of the co-founders, Justin, joins Teaching ESL Online to share this story, and to give us an insight into how the RLE team built a very popular site for English lear... The post Justin Murray on Connecting English Learners, Building an Audience, and Solving Problems appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

Do you have English learners that keep making the same mistakes week after week? If so, then sending personalized audio can help your students overcome these mistakes and internalize correct English. This works for pronunciation and grammar errors, and it can also help them remember new vocabulary. ... The post Create Personalized Audio for Your English Learners appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

  Are you nervous about putting yourself out there as an online teacher? If so, you’re not alone. I speak to a lot of English teachers who want to move online, but fear is holding them back. I know how inhibiting this can be: it affected me for a long time. In certain ways, it still does.... The post Why You Should Put Yourself Out There as an Online Teacher (And How to Overcome this Fear) appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

  With my YouTube Channels, social media profiles, and online courses, I’ve made around 200 videos over the last 12 months. And in this post, I’m going to talk about the equipment and tools I use, along with alternatives to suit every budget. A big part of my process recently has be... The post How to Create Videos: The Equipment and Tools You Need appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

  Over the past two years, email has been at the center of my online marketing efforts for my different brands. But just like designing my site with WordPress, it took me a while to take the plunge and start building an email list. I’m not sure what put me off; maybe I was scared of takin... The post Why Email Marketing Is so Powerful (and How You Can Get Started) appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

Last autumn, I stopped posting content for English learners on the website I started back in 2010. The reason? I was going in a different direction with my teaching and wanted to build a new brand that matched this. I created my first site, JDA English, to promote my online lessons. When a learner l... The post Building a New Brand for English Learners (and Why I Started Again) appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

A few months back, I wrote an article looking at the benefits of using Evernote, Asana, and LastPass as an online teacher. Since then, I have started using other useful applications, and today I want to share three that I’m sure you’re going to love. These apps have helped me save time a... The post Three Amazing Apps for Online Teachers (Part Two) appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

Working closely with online teachers has given me a great insight into what ultimately makes someone a success online. Having a plan in place is crucial and, recently, I discussed the importance of building trust with learners online. But in this post, I want to highlight three things that you need ... The post Three Things You Need to Do to Become a Successful Online Teacher appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

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.