01/26/2021
hello hello everybody nice to see you again
so is anybody there let me know that you see me clearly and
hear me clearly um i'm glad that you are joining uh thanks for coming today uh we're just
about to start um our live session uh and right now just let me know if you
see me clearly and hear me clearly hello guys nice to see you thanks for joining so my name is lisa
uh i am an itt tefl expert and um a current online
esl teacher nice to see you guys joining me thanks a lot
and uh just before we start let me know that you see me clearly and hear me
clearly so that i know that everything works smooth um and just quickly let me
uh tell you about itttt so our company is a tefl provider
uh and we are actually presented on various social networks so
if you guys want uh to get uh updates on uh different tefl content make sure
you follow our social networks and um keep updated
regularly and thanks for joining today's session uh again it's going to be a little bit
different uh from the previous ones because today we have an interesting guest and
we've been talking about online teaching uh quite a lot recently so it's quite
logical to have a guest who has experience teaching english online and today you
guys will have an opportunity uh to ask uh whatever questions you have
um you will be able to ask our guest about
online teaching with prepley so uh stay tuned and just uh in a moment uh
she will come to the session and introduce herself okay
hello anastasia hi lisa yeah hi everybody thanks for watching
today so i hope i'm going helpful yeah uh guys
let us know if you see the both of us together together and the picture is
smooth and the audio is quite good so let us know please
okay hello guys i can see some people joining us again uh
that's so awesome to know that uh there are people who uh come uh again and again
uh thanks a lot and um just quickly let's um
um let's allow anastasia introduce herself so yeah hello everybody my name is
anesthesia or anastasia and i've been teaching on preplea for the last four
months and probably is the online platform where you can advertise yourself um as a tutor
as a teacher and get your students so probably maybe you know italki and
probably is very similar and um it's probably not as popular as i told you
however there are a lot of benefits on properly and i'm going to talk about it so
recently i graduated from my master's degree and i was looking for
some teaching opportunities or just some opportunities in this methodology and teaching sphere because
i'm specializing in mobile assisted learning and just developing platforms that are
connected with online teaching so yeah i've been looking for opportunities in this sphere
and probably uh they were advertising this really cool career opportunity and
i wanted to apply for that but then i realized that i don't know that much about it so yeah i decided to sign up and start
teaching there and i started getting students and they really enjoyed it so lisa you're going to be asking questions
about it right yeah that's right but uh i feel like it would be
quite interesting to everybody know what's your background in teaching
in general so you've already mentioned that you graduated uh from a master's
master's program and what was before that so how did you start teaching uh before
your masters well um i have a bachelor degree in linguistics
and translation and after that i was looking for some exciting career opportunities so my
path led me to china so i worked in china as an esl teacher for almost three years
and after that i decided that i want to develop myself in more like research oriented sphere
so i applied for master degree in the university of barcelona um and also after graduating i
thought that it would be pretty cool to also get a certificate so i got
a tefl certificate to kind of compare my master degree and my bachelor background to this um tefl
degree and that was actually pretty useful yeah that sounds um quite interesting
so could you please tell us a little bit more about um the
applicability of tefl and uh bachelors and masters in your uh career
path it's it's like uh quite challenging and uh questionable for many people like
why should i get a tefl certified or why should i get a bachelor's degree
and whatever because not everyone understands how to apply it in the future career
so could you dwell upon this please oh definitely well okay uh so i would say that my
bachelor degree also all of my degrees and also certificates they're all connected to linguistics
um and my bachelor degree was more similar to like advanced course of
english and we didn't really study any particular methodologies how to teach people or
anything it was like four year course of english which was good and i met amazing people there however i
wanted to have more applicable knowledge uh and when i came to china
i realized that i really love teaching but i don't know how to do it in a better
way so i decided to apply for master degree and then during my
master course it was more related to research which i also loved a lot because i understood like why some
people read this this way to this methodology and why other people react that way to this
methodology and it was amazing and i could um and i could apply these techniques in
my teaching as well and just could conduct the research however there were not that um
many techniques explained how to better teach so um i found this scaffold course um
that you are guys probably interested in also and that was very um i can't say brief
but it was very um it i learned a lot from this course uh
more in terms of teaching like how to teach better about grammar everything just how to present it to
students so they can understand that's that's it awesome thank you
and let's uh just quickly move to uh the preppy thing so um
just in general uh why do you like prepley and what are some benefits of this
platform well as um i'm not i'm non-native
english speaker and i was looking for some online teaching opportunities um
and a lot of platforms they are offering hours but for native teachers
and probably is different because uh you can sign up there
and they don't really look are your native speakers non-native speaker uh and they're
looking more of on how how you want to teach and also on your
credentials certificates and everything else so yeah i decided to sign up and i was
getting students and you can also set your own rate for example if you
have uh celta delta tefl degrees uh you can set your rate
a little higher but if you are not too experienced if i can say you can say lower set it
lower so you can um get students and you can get some um yeah you can just
start teaching and you can see what you can and you can do so it's very useful
all right and is there a lot of competition uh between non-native teachers
and native teachers not really the algorithm of properly it's
very useful so i never actually had any problem that i was not getting some any students
um and also a lot of students they are looking for example
um a teacher who who has your um l1 so for example if
i have a lot of students who are from russia so they were particularly looking for an esl teacher who
has um russian as their first language so that's pretty useful as well and yeah
so there is not that that much of um competition all right that's awesome to
know because there are many uh non-native teachers who believe that
they have less to offer to their future students compared to uh natives and
in general it's not true right so we still have a lot of pros and
uh being able to speak a student's language is also really important and
it can be easier for for us to find um our students
and also from the perspective it's very useful because you can set the parameters to find your ideal teacher for example
if you want a native teacher or non-native teacher or maybe you want a teacher who
particularly teaches the beginners or maybe more advanced learners so you can set it all on properly and
find your perfect person and what about the general audience on
prepley are they more uh young students or adults so what what is the average
portrait picture of a student
oh just any age honestly i taught from five
to 55 and i think this age can go on and on it just depends on
um yeah on how motivated the student is because to find this platform you
just needed to type like language learn platforms so the students are pretty motivated and i
never had any bad experiences um with my students always i
have really amazing students from all around the world and that's so inspiring yeah as
i was given a little interview to lisa i was just saying that
before new year i had students from israel kazakhstan from greece and uh we talked about
new year how people celebrate new year in different countries and that's just pretty pretty amazing i just love this
atmosphere a lot that's so amazing because uh it's also about
cross-cultural communication it's not only about english but about some cultural exchange
it's a great way to start your career as well and by the way
the other thing to consider which is actually a part of our tefl courses
a part of our tefl certification is cultural sensitivity
and how to deal with students from different cultural backgrounds i know that um
it is something you can't find uh anywhere um like at university or at some
ordinary teaching courses where the main purpose is to
explain how to teach the language itself so it's something really important to
learn as well and you've already mentioned
that there are some filters on the website that every teacher and student can use
to reach the audience he or she needs
and what about some other uh specifics of the platform like
uh if you find your i don't know let's say young students
what about the course design are you responsible for that on your own or
the platform offers you something just to start quickly well
that's actually a really good question because prepley uh offers both so you can teach with
your own materials we on your own platform like for example if you're used to teaching zoom
you can uh use zoom or skype or anything google hangouts anything you
like any anywhere you feel comfortable but also you can teach the uh through
preplea platform which is also very convenient and they're uh developing it
every every month and it's getting better and better so maybe like before it was a little
slower now it's getting better and better and you can actually see that i personally teach through zoom because
i'm just used to that and that's all and also uh probably they're offering their own courses from all
kinds of levels targeting all kinds of audiences like they have the special course for
kids uh starting from the beginner level and up to i think b2 right now they have
uh just targeting the topics that are of interest for kids
uh and also they have courses for business uh courses for
even like advanced learners so if you want you can use their courses or if you're used to your
own teaching materials so maybe other programs you can you can use it they're very flexible i would say that
probably is more like a platform where you advertise yourself you're looking for your
students because you can just write that i am specializing in younger learners so i'm
looking for um i'm looking to connect with young learners from anywhere around the world
or maybe you are the um ielts teachers so you're looking for students to just
teach ielts so that's very useful i would say awesome thank you so you can basically
be well quite relaxed on the point of materials
because uh if you need you can use their preps and that will be just all
right right yes yes it's pretty good they're uh touching upon very interesting topics
sometimes starting from environment and movies anything so if maybe you don't have enough time
to prepare your own lesson you can have a little bit of help from properly so that's nice that's great yeah
thank you and uh the other question would be devoted to the registration process like uh is it
hard to get into properly or it's like one to three uh i
well i think it's pretty easy it's like in other platforms you have to record a
one minute video introducing yourself where you can speak just english maybe english and your
native language looking for students who want a teacher speaking their native language
um so yeah number one you record the video you write a brief introduction
uh in all of the languages that you are speaking for example i wrote the introduction in english
russian and spanish so i can target these audiences um and yeah so introduction video and
you can also upload some of the certificates like your degrees your tefl center delta
anything you have so to make yourself look pretty impressive yeah awesome
and um could you probably give any tips on how to record a perfect video
because uh it can be quite challenging for those who've never tried
teaching online and like introduction video is something to um be really nervous about
true true i can understand so for the very beginning you can just
record a simple video um sitting talking to the camera but just try to make it really quality
because put yourself um on the place where the student is so it would be just so much
nicer to look at the teacher with a nice quality with a nice sound
so yeah just look nice look happy and talk about what you enjoy teaching and
how you enjoy teaching your methodology where are you from and just yeah that's
be just who you are and that's really attractive to these students and um then
later after that you can also record the video um in just a place in
a nice place maybe even outside but just make sure that the audio is good quality you can see a lot of videos on youtube
where the teachers are creating like nice youtube kind of videos introducing themselves and that also
that's my goal actually in the future to um make it like maybe talking and also
have some background uh videos just yeah be creative i think that would be cool because there are a
lot of teachers who are just speaking in front of the camera with very um kinda not um angry
but yeah just not super excitable faces and that's not that
kinda yeah so be cheerful and what about equipment
then so you mentioned that it's important to make sure the quality
is all right what equipment would you recommend to get beforehand
well i just used my laptop and um none of my students never complained
about it but you know that some teachers they are actually using this special headphones the
special cameras that's up to you and i'll always ask your student for feedback if the quality is good and also
yeah make sure that the internet connection is good and that you always have for example either skype
zoom uh to help you if for example the preplay space is not working so you can
quickly uh move to zoom if something is wrong with the platform or from zoom maybe to skype all right
that's awesome to know that uh we are just able to start uh with the minimum of equipment we have
and yeah it's something really um really convenient because um there are
some teachers who are like um perfectionists and uh i've seen
so many youtube videos related to online teaching and all over them
they suggest to get as much stuff as it is possible to make sure
the picture is cool the sound is awesome and so on and what about your
online teaching classroom so uh do you try to organize it in a specific way
and do you aim at impressing your students especially
if you teach young children well i mostly teach adults
right now and i don't have that many young students and i don't really have like a special
background on the back where you can have like a cute map or watch or anything like this
and i'm sure that it's amazing for teachers who teach young students and they would like to to do that
but right now i'm targeting more adult audiences so i'm more focusing on the materials that
i can share with my um students so as for that i use google
disk where i have this special folder for each student where i can write some notes and upload some
materials presentation for every lesson i prepare a ppt that i can also share with
those students and also it's very useful for young kids as well to share with the parents so they can
see what you actually learned after the lesson and it's super useful
because yeah you can just follow what you just learned and maybe you can repeat everything
so yeah presentations google uh drive google disk yeah that's the one
and uh yeah just the handouts and uh i always send the pdf so the um
all the materials all right so you should basically uh uh just remember
about your students age and their needs and uh adjust to their um
well conditions okay and uh let's just move on uh to talking
about uh the rates um i i can see that there are questions
related to average rates and what's your point here
well um yeah that's a good question of course we are motivated by that as well
uh and i can say a few words about it so you set your own ring on properly and
some people set it from like five dollars per hour up to i don't know 50 dollars and you
can see anything but you should uh understand yourself how much you're worth and uh yeah
what kind of credential you have and everything like that uh so yeah from five to fifty don't set
it too low because yeah but also it's good to understand that in some countries uh price is like 50 dollars that's
definitely too expensive so um yeah it's important to consider what
kind of audience you're targeting and also the prepley um
platform they are charging some percentage from every lesson so usually the first lesson the
introduction lesson to the student it's uh free for you so you don't get paid for that
that's important to consider so the students pay but it goes to the platform because of
properly algorithm uh they're connecting you with a student so they're charging for that
uh but then um students can buy uh sets of lessons starting from six
hours to i don't know maybe 22 hours and so on and so on and uh yeah so you student can't buy
just one lesson a student buys a set of lessons and that's really good uh and
also properly charges from oh my goodness i think from 30 percent maximum and then
uh when you have more and more lessons it goes up to 18 from the lesson so it's
motivating to have more lessons um but i honestly i think it's okay because you
can set your rate thinking make taking into consideration this percentage so if you usually charge
15 dollars per hour instead of 18 um so for you it's still
15 and yeah you can be smart about it and also as for students uh they get
some discounts if they buy the sets of lessons which is also profitable for them so
it's good for you and good for students as well and uh what else can i say about that
and i think yeah that's all uh so uh it means that the first
introductory lesson isn't paid uh for you as a teacher but students
definitely pay to the platform and what if for example uh you like your
student and the student likes you and you just exchange contacts uh and uh you agree
to uh get paid uh somewhere else like for example students transfer
uh the money to your paypal account is it possible well i think that platform it blocks
this kind of messages i don't know there is an algorithm for that but also i personally like to work
through properly because i always know that i can set my own schedule
and i can get the students according to the schedule and also if for example the student forgot
or just missed the lesson i will still get paid because they buy uh the
lessons in bulk so i uh the platform still will transfer money uh
martin to me from for this lesson even if the student just forgot yeah so it's reasonable you stay on
on the safe side and it's just quite normal to consider this feast
and that's all okay um that's awesome to know as well and um
well uh you've already mentioned uh something about delta and celta
and i would like to ask your opinion like uh you've already got your tefl
certificate and there are a lot of students who don't know what uh to choose like is it
better to get celta or is it better to get tefl first uh what's your opinion and
how can you use it in your teaching particularly well that's a very good
question when i was looking into all of this kind of certificates i was researching about
this topic so um i would say that um getting a tefl is the perfect first step
before getting celta especially for the teachers who never taught before and
never had any kind of exposure to linguistics so uh trying to starting with
tefl is yeah just a good i can't say that it's introductory course
because it has so much material in it but celta and delta it's
very dense there is so much information there and if you i still have maybe your full-time
job that takes a lot of time to complete celton delta that's kind of like a degree like getting a
degree but just particularly in teaching so comparing master cell to delta and tefl i would
say that if you really want to start teaching tefl is the perfect certificate for the very beginning but
then if you want to get more uh if you want to immerse more into the sphere uh you can get
south of delta and master is more particularly about research if you want to conduct a research in um
any sphere for example i was interested in mobile assisted learning like applications and platforms so i was
researching into it i was conducting the um research in this field with participants but i think certain delta
it's more like teaching and you get so much information
there as well but if you never had any kind of experience with
teaching and you started celta i think it can be quite challenging yeah that's right
and um if you right now uh would change if you choose between
online teaching and in-class teaching what would you choose oh this is so hard well right now we
don't really have a choice because of the situation in many countries
but i really enjoy teaching online because it's just um very convenient and you can
teach anyone from any place for example before i lived in barcelona and then i
moved to russia and none of the students really noticed that i changed the location so
you can from anywhere uh however you will also like teaching in the classroom which is good i would
probably mix but i see so many benefits teaching online like for example if you're
teaching the classroom i think you can have less students because um you it takes
time to wait for the students to come into classroom then after that you need to finish and then
a lot of students can maybe be late but with online teaching
uh you start at the exact time and then you can also finish exactly the time when you're supposed to
finish so you don't really have to um leave long hours after the lesson like in
between the lessons so you can have more lessons in a day if you really want to
that's awesome uh and uh am i right to understand that uh it's your full full-time job right
now uh it's not my full-time job but i would say that 60 of my time it's it's devoted to teaching
and yeah i really love it and do you think it's possible to uh have online teaching as a full-time
job well definitely yes definitely you can um make it into full-time career
and uh do you think there are any other options for online english teaching to uh make money
like uh some side's way or something like that so apart from teaching itself
ah yeah there are a lot of ways that you can use your linguistic abilities in the
sphere like creating course materials uh for other teachers i think that's that's pretty cool or
i don't know maybe a copywriting as well writing some articles related to that
um yeah just all i don't know conducting lessons with
various students like in groups that's also good but yeah um you can do a lot of things
just you need to look for that yeah that's right so it's it's usually um up to you if you
want to make more money you will be uh very proactive and will look uh for different
opportunities all right so that these are just uh all of the questions i wanted to ask you
and uh right now probably there are some questions uh in the chat box so let's quickly
check it out and make sure our students not students are listeners
can get the answers they look for
so there is one question i'm from bangladesh how to engage
teachers so that they can earn by online teaching or teach in abroad um
would you please expand a little bit on this question because i'm not
completely sure if i understand it like uh do you want are you a recruiter
and you want to help teachers to work either online or abroad so
please give us some more explanation and we will try our best to answer
and here is the question about celta so no itttt doesn't provide
celta this course is provided by other organizations
and uh celta is usually an in-class course so if you look for
something to dive into uh celta is an option but you should
know that it takes more time to get it it is more um um
it is more expensive yeah expensive in terms of uh investment um
yeah so uh it's a bit different and if you want it you
should probably learn the requirements so it's uh it's a different course
and itttttt provides tefl all right and i saw
some other questions no there are no questions so guys um let me just
quickly remind you that we are presented on various stuff
on various uh social networks make sure you uh keep updated uh so
subscribe and uh stay with us we are really happy to share
our experiences so that's why we do this online sessions weekly uh and we
also shared the all kinds of stuff all over our social media so if you need
like teaching tips or some materials uh you'll find it there and
just quickly let me change the slide right so i've mentioned that
uh we're going to uh make the special offer uh it is right here uh if you want
any of our tefl courses with this uh qr code you'll be able to
get a 30 discount of any courses but there is no strings attached
if you want to get it a little bit later just make sure you scan it right now or you follow
this link this coupon linked link from the chat box and
the the data will be stored on your browser and you will be able to get your
30 disc discount uh whenever you need it like um
as far as i remember the data is stored up to 30 days on your computer so
uh you'll be able to get this 30 discount a little bit longer right and
uh just quickly let's do this q and a session uh if you want to ask anything related
to tefl online teaching if you're interested in preplea
i would like you to ask anastasia any any questions you have uh
so let's do it right now and yeah so if you have any questions on
tefl online teaching properly whatever uh let us know and um
that will be all for today i think so yeah if you have any more questions
you can just write in the facebook chat and i will reply to it later yeah that's right
we actually uh record this session and it will be online
on facebook and youtube so if you still have any questions after it will
will be able to reach you back but if you have anything in your mind
right now just let us know because um prepley and online teaching is something
really interesting to uh just dwell upon uh and let's make sure anastasia shares
her experience
okay are there any questions
all right there are things all right thank you for the efforts and
thanks for coming here uh we're glad to have you joining us weekly uh and if you guys
um just watch the sessions uh after uh
it goes online uh thanks for that as well uh and i also know that there are some
people who prefer to uh listen to the uh audios so to listen to uh podcasts thanks for
downloading and uh don't forget that there are two live sessions
weekly the first one is on tuesdays and the second one is on fridays uh usually
and uh my colleague linda goes live uh weekly as well and shares her
uh experience with you guys as well so just welcome come to join our sessions
and we'll make sure that your questions are answered and you get
some pieces of knowledge and information you really look for uh
and if you guys don't have any questions to anastasia right now uh let's just finish this session and
uh we will meet uh next week again um we just wait
like for one more minute and it's over okay thanks for joining and
say thanks for your feedback uh we hope that the sessions are
valuable and uh interesting to you okay and thanks for coming again
yeah thank you for listening all right so that is all for today and i hope to
see you next week so bye bye
