The TEFL Guide To Teaching English On the Internet

Adapting Lesson Plans

For many TEFL teachers, the most exciting part of working abroad is the adventure of traveling to another country, experiencing new cultures and building new friendships along the way. The hard part is having to give up everything when your contract expires - particularly the relationships that you built with your friends and students.

Although TEFL teaching jobs are temporary, the people that you meet and the relationships that you build aren't. After working for several years in another country, you'll probably want to maintain contact with your students and friends. And if you are an effective and well-liked teacher, many of your students will probably ask if you can continue to teach them long before you were able to say your goodbyes.

Although many native TEFL teachers eventually leave their teaching positions, some continue to teach their students by using the internet. What's the cheapest solution to staying in touch with your students? And how can you continue to continue to teach them? The solution is online tutoring. Even if you're not interested in online teaching, the technology available for communicating over the internet will still help you to communicate and maintain your long distance relationship - for free.

If you're serious about online tutoring, you'll need a website to promote your services as well as a way to communicate with your students. Lets look at some different ways that you could tutor your students online.

Two of the most popular free messaging programs used by online tutors is MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. Most people either have a Hotmail or Yahoo email account, and the odds are that they are also familiar with the voice and chat features of these programs.

Using Hotmail and Yahoo Mail For Emails, Chat and Messaging
Using a free email service to send practice tests, exercises and quizzes; or to answer questions is probably the easiest way to communicate with your students. Even if you're not fond of emails, don't discount their importance as a teaching tool. They're still the fastest and most efficient way to get a message to someone on the other side of the world.

In addition to email, Yahoo and Hotmail comes with chat programs and instant messengers that allow you to instantly interact one-to-one with your students. Most students, even if they live abroad, already know how to use the chat and instant messaging programs in Yahoo and MSN Messengers, making it easy for you to get started.

Using Skype and Gizmo for Voice and Video Conferencing
Another popular program which allows you to make voice calls over the internet is Skype (http://www.skype.com) and Gizmo Project (http://www.gizmoproject.com). Skype has everything you need - voice, chat and the ability to do video-conferencing. The best part about using Skype is that it's a free software! All you need is to download a free copy of Skype, a microphone, and a computer that is connected to the internet. For more information about SKYPE see the TEFL Guide To Teaching With SKYPE. Gizmo is similar to Skype and offers many of the same features, but with a greater capacity to handle multi-user conferencing.

Using Microsoft NetMeeting For Web Conferencing
Another popular add-on application for teaching over the internet is to use a web-conferencing software. Microsoft NetMeeting, a free windows-based application, is perhaps one of the most popular free web-conferencing application used by online teachers. NetMeeting offers many other valuable features besides conferencing, including voice and email. For more information about teaching with NetMeeting see the TEFL Guide To Using MS NetMeeting. For other alternatives to web conferencing see the Choosing A Web-Conference Provider guide.

If online tutoring sounds like a great idea, and you'd like to give it a try. Start by getting the word out to your students and their parents. Try browsing through the interactive ESL lesson plans and ESL Games and Activities at Online Tutoring World.com. As your services grows you might want to consider building your own online tutoring website, adding Paypal or some other credit card processing program and uploading your lesson plans into a database.