 Welcome to another live session by ITTT. My name is Linda. Welcome. Happy to have you today. As you can see, today's topic is 10 free tools and software that English online teachers can use perfect for English online teachers or just online teachers in general. It doesn't have to be English. Any sort of teacher can use these but we're primarily focusing on online English teachers today. Thank you so much for joining. If you are here, if you are watching, if you can see me and hear me clearly, please just leave a comment in the comment box and let me know that everything is working properly. You know, sometimes there are technical issues and I just want to make sure that everything is working as it should. There are some comments already. So yeah, I guess it's working. We are live on YouTube and on Facebook at the same time. Hi, Sherilyn. Hi, I'm so glad you're here as well. And we have EG. Hello, I'm doing great today. Jerome. Hi, great. I'm glad everything looks good. Awesome. I'm so excited about this topic today. I hope you are too. That's why you're here. So thank you so much for joining in. If you've seen any of our other live sessions before, you know the drill. There's a short introduction and then we jump into the topic. I usually prepare some slides like here. And yeah, today we're going to cover 10 different tools that you can use as online teachers that are going to help you, that are completely free as well. Also going to share a list of the best, in my opinion, the best online teaching platforms right in the beginning. So because I know some people don't have all the time to watch the whole live. So sometimes people are just watching a little bit in the beginning. They save it. They come back later. Always an option. We always keep our live sessions in playlists in our playlist on Facebook and on YouTube as well. I highly recommend checking out that playlist. We have covered a lot of topics in the past. So you might find something interesting there as well. That being said, please don't forget to like and subscribe. Like our Facebook page. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check us out on all the other social media platforms. We also are active on, you know, Twitter, Pinterest. We share teaching tips there. Anywhere. YouTube, if you didn't know in Facebook, we share stuff on a daily basis actually. And yes, also there is a 30% off code during our live sessions. So today as well, as you can see in the upper right hand corner over there, there is a QR code that you can scan. And then you get a 30% discount of any Teflor T sole course from ITTT. So that's very helpful. If you can't scan the code, no problem. I'm going to share the discount link in the comment box right now. So you can check that out. It looks like this. You click on this link. It leads you to our website, to the actual application page. So if you're not sure yet, you know, what course to take, you can obviously take more time, you know, looking on the website. And then when you're ready, you know which course is right for you. You go to this application page and you just fill out your application and you'll see a 30% discount there. So if you're not yet, Teflor T sole certified, check it out. Very, very good. A very good deal. We only share those 30% off codes during our live sessions. All right, good. We have, yeah, all clear and you are shining as usual. Thank you so much. It's so sweet. Juliana. Hi. Good to see you again. We also have Adam here. Hi. What's up? Awesome. Cool. Cool. Good to see you all. Guys, where are you right now? Where are you at? Everybody? Where is everybody at? I know Juliana is in Illinois. I am in South Korea. I forgot to mention I am in South Korea. It is 10 a.m. on a Friday. I'm super excited. Friday. And we are heading into a holiday weekend. Monday is off. It's the, what is it called? Like foundation day, I think? Something like that. So that's on the third Sunday. So the government, actually fun fact before we jump in, the government in South Korea, they introduced this new law that whenever a public holiday falls on a weekend, the following Monday is off. So that's new this year. I think it was like since only summer, in summer they introduced that. So that's why whenever there's a public holiday that falls on Saturday or Sunday, Monday has to be off. So that's why. And a lot of people obviously love that. That's very, very nice. So that's what's happening this weekend and next weekend as well because next on the 9th there's another holiday, which is Sunday. So Monday is off again. It's pretty awesome. Awesome. Cool. We have Sherlyn from the Philippines. Hi. We have Lee. It's 2 a.m. Where are you, Lee? Jerome is in Boston. Yeah, 9 p.m. Thursday. So we're, oh my God, 11 hours. We have an 11 hour time difference. No, or 13. I always, I can't, I'm a language person, not a math person. Yeah. Awesome. We have Arif. Hi. Okay. Lee is in England. Awesome. And EG is living in the U.A.E. right now. It's 5 a.m. Wow. Thanks for getting up so early. And Imi, it's 2 a.m. as well. Wow. Thank you guys for staying up so late for this live session. I really appreciate it. So without further ado then because I don't want you to get, you know, sleep deprived. Let's jump into the topic then. As always, you can rewatch these episodes if you can't make it to the end. It's probably going to take about 45 minutes to an hour to go through everything. But you can come back later, no problem. Also, as always, you are free to always ask any questions you might have during this live session. There will also be a dedicated Q&A section at the end once I'm done with all my slides. So we have time to ask questions then as well. Also, if you're listening to this as a podcast episode, thank you very much for the download. We always turn our live sessions into podcast episodes. And we recently just hit 6,500 podcast downloads. I'm so excited. So if that's something that interests you as well, if you're rather, you know, listening to this as a podcast episode, go ahead. You can find us on all major podcast platforms and you just type in Teflenteso podcast by ITTT and you'll find it there. Hi, we have HiTechVietnam. Hello. How are you? I'm doing very well. How are you? Where in Vietnam are you? Awesome. Great. All right. Then let's jump in. I don't want to hold anybody up here. Let me just check. Everything's good. I'm working with two computers here and it's just me. There's no one in the background helping me. So please bear with me if there's any delays. And sometimes I just need to take a sip of my coffee because it is early-ish and I do get a sore throat sometimes from talking so much, but that's about it. Yeah. All right. Then I'm just going to make myself a little bit smaller so that you can see the slides better. And yeah, like I said, today's topic is 10 free tools and also software for English online teachers. Those are free tools that you can use that are significantly going to help you in your online classes and also managing classes and finding materials for your classes and all of those things. So first off, oh my gosh. First off, a quick introduction about myself. If you have never seen me before, my name is Linda. I'm a travel writer and content creator. I have my own website which is currently down because I'm renewing it. So if you're checking it out now, lindegoseast.com, it's probably down, but it should be up and running again a completely new site and layout later today in a couple of hours, I hope. So do check it out then. And also on Instagram, I love sharing my content on Instagram at lindegoseast and many of you have already reached out over on Instagram. And it's really, really interesting to talk with you one-on-one and share things. So I really appreciate that. I'm originally from Germany at the US. My mom is German. My dad is American, but I am based in South Korea. I've been here since 2015. Before that, I was also in China. I lived in Germany and America and China and Korea. So yeah, still in Korea now. And I'm also a TEFL and TESOL marketing professional for ITTT. ITTT stands for International TEFL and TESOL Training. You can find us at TEFLCourse.net and on Instagram at International TEFL Training. And obviously some of you are watching on Facebook and on YouTube, so you can find us there as well. And like I said, we also have a pretty big Pinterest account where we also share a lot of good materials for classes. Yeah, ITTT is a leading TEFL and TESOL course provider worldwide. We have a wide variety of different TEFL and TESOL courses, lifetime job support. So if you are not get TEFL or TESOL certified, I highly recommend checking that out. And also with the discount link that I shared in the beginning or at any time, you can scan this QR code in the upper right hand corner to get your 30% off as well. Or you just look into the comment section. There should be this link and you can fill out your application and save 30% off any TEFL or TESOL course from ITTT. Yeah, that's it about me. Let's jump in. And the first thing actually I want to share with you are 20 online teaching companies to work for. And this is if you watched one of my, this was a couple of weeks ago when I did a live session about teaching online, I shared this list as well because these are all non-Chinese online teaching companies because there were some new laws and regulations passed in China that's kind of made it a lot more difficult for teachers from outside of China to teach for online, Chinese online teaching platforms. So that's why I think at the moment it is kind of best to stick to non-Chinese companies so you don't have to worry about, you know, just suddenly being late off or not getting any students and things like that. So I'm going to share this link with you and this again, I shared this before so some of you might have it, but what I want you to do if you think this is useful to you, go ahead and open this link. It's a Google spreadsheet and you can just go ahead and make a copy of this and then save it for yourself. And I'm just going to show you real quick what it looks like. Okay, one second. I'm just going to share a different screen then. So I just want to make sure that you know how to work with this sheet. And then we go into the tools. So this is what it looks like. Yeah, I see many of you have clicked on it. So this is what it looks like and all you will do is just click on file and then make a copy. And then this is your own and you can edit your own and you can save it and keep that for reference. But yeah, so these are 20 non Chinese online teaching companies you can work for. You can see hourly rates, obviously the company name. So you can look for that hourly rate and then the requirements, you know, do you need to have a degree? Do you need to plan your own lessons or are the lessons provided information about the students who be teaching adults or children, etc. Are there any minimum hours? Some teaching platforms, they will have minimum hours that you need to teach per week or per month. So this is for example, 1012 per week, you have to teach, but some they don't have any minimum. So you're free to even just teach one hour, for example, is a Tefl required or not, do they accept non native English speakers or not? Do you need to have previous teaching experience, all those things, and just any additional information. And here's the application link. So I just wanted to share that with you right off the bat so that everybody has it. And you can just use that for your reference to just yeah, do with that, what you will basically. Okay. Oh, maybe there any questions about it? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Jerome, yes, I remember you were there at that time. Yeah. So I just wanted to share that with you again in case you know somebody obviously there's some new people today. So just want to pass that along. So again, just click on file and make a copy and then you have your own version of this for reference you can keep it you can edit it etc. Okay, good. Then I'm going to share my slides again one second. Yes. Good. All right. Very good. All right, then let's start with the first tool that I want to talk about today and that is zoom. Now, obviously, probably most of you have worked with zoom and you know zoom, probably better than me. Actually, I think I was a start a late starter when it came to zoom I used to only use skype and then my teaching platform where I teach now. They also started offering zoom classes and I actually teach someone else who was also using zoom so I had some experience from that. But I actually now prefer zoom over Skype and a lot of people say that that zoom is better. So what is zoom used for if you don't know it's for video conferencing or like video meetings, video phoning and it's basically going to act as your virtual classroom. And also since countries around the world went into lockdown zooms daily usage has gone up at least 300 percent according to some statistics, which is really awesome. And also because the usage has gone up so much they're constantly adding new features to it, which is just so great for teachers because zoom has been used for online teaching, especially during the pandemic and the lockdowns in so many different countries and so many new features have been added that are so useful to teachers. So if you are not using zoom yet, you might really want to look into it and they also have I mean on YouTube there's so many tutorials or like webinars of the features and you can learn because even now for me it's sometimes a little bit difficult to navigate. There's so many features and can be sometimes a little bit overwhelming so you kind of do need to have some kind of crash course before you start using zoom like for as a teacher professionally. I recommend doing that but yeah some of the best functions in zoom are that you can enable or disable recording so you can record your lessons which can be really useful not only for you know yourself so you can refer back to it oh what did I do with that student did what did we learn or what did I teach them but also if you know a student kind of complains or maybe a parent of the student complains you can show them video proof oh no actually we covered this or oh no this is how it happened you know sometimes you just want to have some proof something you can actually show and refer back to but also you can use this for yourself for feedback so you can rewatch and maybe improve you know your teaching skills very useful also the mute and unmute function sometimes especially if you teach a lot of students you don't want to have them all like with open mics so you want to have the option you can actually mute all of your students so that only you are unmuted which is really good something I think a feature that we would really want to have in the real world as well that would be very useful we also have room polling so you can actually do polls live you know in during the session which is really cool and then another feature that I also think is really really good and I haven't really used is um waiting rooms so you can enable that and then only you can see when someone's basically in the waiting room and then you can let them in to your class your virtual class which is kind of cool so while you're still prepping um maybe and then you can let them all in so they are waiting in the waiting room first and there's also a meeting or a class scheduler so you can basically set up schedule the class and then send out an email reminder or just an invitation to the person as well so I think that's really good there's some more I've picked what I really like also this is a new feature so it says better but it's the slides as virtual background so that's really great for teachers I think so you can actually change your background to be slides that you make like a presentation which is cool so you can just present like almost like in the real world which is kind of cool then obviously the white board that is super useful for teachers I'm also going to show you another white board option in a little bit that I use personally um then screen sharing that is what I do so I use a different tool for white board for boarding stuff and then I use the screen sharing feature on zoom to share that with my audience so that my students can see my screen you can also um that's the great thing about zoom that Skype can't do or at least I don't I don't think I figured it out on Skype I don't think you can do it on Skype when you share your screen um when you share your screen you can give your student remote access to your screen so this is really good for you know letting your students kind of take over and complete some exercises and tasks tasks by themselves rather than you just always moving your mouse and doing everything um and I think that really adds a very very good interactive component because with online teaching sometimes I think it's just a lot of like lecture style so you want to make it as interactive as possible for your students and I think that this remote control option really does that really well and every time I've used it with my students they loved it they love being in control and filling out the board or you know matching you can do matching exercises they can move your mouse and stuff like that and also type they can type um so it's really really good I really like that about um zoom and this is something you can't do on Skype um at least I'm not aware I don't think you can then we have computer audio uh that's also something that Skype can't do I think so this is especially useful for if you're showing a video or if you do any kind of listening exercises you'd need to be able to share your computer audio so that your students can also hear it in the same quality and volume so yeah and then there's also a feature on zoom where it lets you connect to your dropbox so this is good for um sharing files and things like that um and then I found this article here 20 of the best zoom tools and features so I just wanted to share that with you as well because there's so many more um tools and features and like integrations so some of the some of them are like third-party tools that you can download and link with your zoom um so check that out there might be something really really useful there yeah looks like this article from teach thought the best zoom tools for teachers so there's a lot more that you can do with zoom to make your classes more interactive so yeah and maybe there's some tools are there some other tools that you use for teaching that maybe I have missed that you find very very useful like I said I'm fairly new to zoom actually so I'm sure some of you are actually much more familiar with zoom and how to use it best um for teaching online so I would love to hear from you guys any of you if there is a feature that I have not mentioned right now that you think um we should add to our list let me know and I'm gonna drink some coffee while I'm waiting for an answer maybe not I mean there's really so much you can do with zoom and that's why I think it's best to kind of watch some tutorials or you know webinar from them yeah Juliana says Skype is good actually do not have a zoom account yeah so some of those features like I said I don't think you can you can do screen share on Skype but you can't give remote access I don't think on Skype and you can share audio so I actually think zoom for teaching is better than Skype in my opinion okay for groups breakout rooms are useful what are breakout rooms so if we're taking a break I've not heard of breakout rooms that sounds very good okay Jerome says but for groups groups you need more than the free zoom account oh if you if you have a meeting with more than one person you need a pro account I didn't know that um Microsoft team is an option I believe yeah and I think also Google just started doing something like team as well in their Gmail they added more functions more than three okay so if you're teaching more than three people you need a you need to upgrade okay yeah I only teach one-on-one actually I don't teach any group classes yet so I did not know that that's good to know interesting good all right and Cheryl and says you can also divide students when they do group work in zoom oh that's very cool awesome okay okay and breakout rooms are separate rooms that you can time and assign any number of students into each room okay wow cool yeah that's really useful as well for bigger groups if you teach a group for sure that's very cool see learn something new today okay very nice mm-hmm EG also says breakout rooms divide your students into groups and they can do some tasks separately can you then as a teacher can you uh do you have access to all of those rooms can you see what's going on in the rooms do you have like the power you know to overview to supervise all of the rooms interesting very cool okay yeah I haven't really okay yes Jerome says you can enter any room at any time oh yeah very nice yeah cool that sounds very very useful for group activities and stuff yeah projects very cool okay awesome thanks need to check it out but like I said I only teach one one on one at the moment so and good to know that zoom is only free up to two people up to three people so if you teach more than three people you need to upgrade according to Jerome all right I didn't know that either that's good to know okay good then let's move on to the second one um what I have on my list is Myro so my colleague Lisa who's also who also goes live once a week she usually goes live Tuesdays um she kind of introduced me to Myro I didn't know about Myro before um and I love Myro now so Myro what is Myro it's basically your virtual whiteboard so that's what I said when yeah zoom has a whiteboard feature function but I use Myro actually um basically it's an online collaborative whiteboard platform you can it's used for presentation for sharing you can also embed videos and music and images and anything basically they also offer free weekly webinars because also there's a ton of features and options and it's kind of overwhelming in the beginning so um every week they have free webinars that you can watch to just learn more about Myro and the features and what you can do and yeah it's free to use for up to three boards and I'm just going to show you what that looks like um I'm going to share my screen so you can see what Myro is if you don't know Myro is anybody also using Myro let me know so this is for example my account and I have three boards here I only have a free account so you can have three boards and so let's go into this board this is the board I use for most of my students I wish maybe I'll upgrade in the future but um this is my most used board and so it's huge you have it's so big this is um everything you have access to this whole board and then you can zoom in so for example uh yeah let's just zoom in here that's a good example so this is what I do here this is German but I teach German and English so you can this is for one of my students she um lives in Austria and she wanted to have a lesson about hair like at the hair salon so this is what we did and um so I use this to prepare my class and then uh screen share and then you can also give on zoom remote access and they can actually so I had all the vocabulary down here and then you can actually like you know it's interactive you can do that you can zoom into the pictures you can um types stuff excuse me you can type something you know um you can also create like shapes um you can you have a pen you can underline things that are important you can highlight things you can also create for example like games this is a game I've created for one of my students for a kid and they also have a dice feature I haven't turned that on right now but um yeah for example I made this Disney inspired with like Disney princesses like a board game you know with questions to answer so it's super useful or you can just like you know add any kind of worksheet to it um you can also embed this is like a link from and that's just an image you can also embed youtube videos um or here you can like cover stuff for example with like some little sticky notes so I really like my road that's what I use for my for teaching um because I think it's just so easy to use and then I use screen sharing so this is my rose anybody using my rose well okay Jerome says I've been playing around with and exploring my recently yeah what do you think about it do you like it do you like it hi Luke yeah um you can ask questions today as well actually so if you have a question there will be a Q&A at the end um so yeah but um yeah maybe I'll do a Q&A a whole just asking questions live session next week but feel free to ask questions as well so this is my row I really enjoy my row I like it um I think it's very very useful and also Lisa um my colleague Lisa she actually did a live session explaining how she prepares games and stuff with my row so there'll be a lot more um details in this live session so it looks like this on youtube um check it out it's designing online english lessons with my row so yeah yeah I kind of like it too for sure good so if you want to learn more about my row check out the other live because I'm not going to go too much into depth now um I like it I love using it um and I also learned about it from Lisa from watching this video so I recommend that good next up we have google docs this is also I mean most of you are probably gonna be aware that um for sharing and collaborating on word documents so it is a lot like word microsoft word but web based um I actually only use google docs now I don't even have microsoft word installed on my computer at all I only use web based google docs and google spreadsheets and whatnot um it's perfect for homework assignments so that's what I use it for mostly um I share the links you can share links like I shared the spreadsheet link um and I share that with my students and then they can do the homework and then during class with screen sharing again we can um we can uh correct it together see it together I can make you know edits and because you can see writing and editing in real time so that's why it's really really great in real time you can both once you have the stock open you can see what the other person's doing if they're typing anything if they highlight anything anything like that um yeah you can also create you know and share materials like homework or other um exercises projects whatnot reading um and you can also save anything from there as a word doc or pdf and then share it with your students so um I'm sure all of you probably know kind of what google docs is but um I just wanted to mention that because I use it mostly for my homework and for kind of student feedback or like I write down what we did in that class kind of first we did this second this this this for kind of record keeping and then sharing it with the student um just just things like that yeah okay number four interesting very exciting because um I use this all the time canva canva so what is canva canva is for creating appealing visuals and presentations and actually this presentation those slides I always make them in canva I love canva and also because I am a content creator and a blogger I use canva for that as well um but it's also super awesome for teachers so it's a web based graphic design platform they also have a free version there is a pro version that has a lot more like features and lets you use like more pro stuff I guess um but for the regular person a free account is totally enough they also have a lot of templates I'm going to show you that also in a minute um and it just allows you to create visual content of all kind um so you can make teaching materials for your students for example so um for example on my row let me just go back here to my my row board um this what I just showed you actually this I made this in canva so I found this board on google and then I added my own questions with canva here it was a blank board and I added these in and also the go back spaces I added that in on canva for example yeah so you can make teaching materials for your students homework um any kind of other visuals and um you could also make social media content to market yourself as a teacher if you you know want to go um if you want to teach independently you have your own teaching website or your own you know you just want to spread the word about yourself you can also create stuff like that um joe is asking how long have you been using canva honestly probably five years or more um I really like canva um I also have a pro account you can save um you know it's like a they have a branding section in the pro account where you can save your logo and your brand colors and brand fonts and stuff like that so I use that because of that um so yeah let me just show you actually I can just do it this way yeah so this is canva and like I said this presentation I always also make in canva and you have a lot of templates you can choose from for example so and some of this will be in korean because I am in korea so they just recently kind of I think added that um so maybe wherever you are other languages might show up as well but yeah so this is a presentation uh you can also or just let me share the other one hold on let me share one second this yeah so this is what it looks like and basically it will ask you what will you design so literally you can pick anything from presentations from instagram posts logos stories a four documents business cards posters flies anything you can design so um oh and I actually typed in so you can also yeah okay good it's still in here you can also search for keywords so for example I put in teaching online and then you can get some inspiration or templates so this is something you can use you know for your uh for your marketing for example see this so you can then if you're like oh I like this and also the dimension the format this is really nice so online class let's learn together you can edit all of this so online class and then you could you know with miss I call myself miss linda and I teach oh you can't see that oh why can't you see that oh I'm sharing the wrong one oh no oh okay hold on one second I didn't know it would do that too many screens for sharing here okay I think it's this one let me check yes okay so this is the template and then you can edit anything you can change any color you know anything you can change here you can also search for elements you can search for different pictures for example here photos you can all search for something these are trending so we can do this one instead for example yeah so um literally anything yes juliana says I use that for creating my newsletter yeah you can use canva for anything you can resize you can make it oh I need a facebook cover or I need you know I want to make a facebook post or a logo or instagram story so it will have all of the dimensions that you need already and if we click for example on instagram story um you can then see templates for stories oh this is cute and then you can just edit it you know with your own text with your own colors and everything so I really like canva for that reason and like I said my presentations that I always do on these live sessions they're all made with canva like this one that we're looking right now and then I just do present and it opens up bigger yeah so I love canva I use it pretty much every day honestly joey says I use canva to make an activity called an english pit stop this is a five to ten minute activity for reviewing materials students had difficulty with and or need additional practice with it can be anything from basic math to vocabulary yeah cool so yeah you can use canva to create activities to create visual anything literally social media posts um it's just great so and then you can save this in any kind of format you want you can save it as a video you can save it as pdf png jpeg you can directly share it onto your social medias you can link your social accounts to canva um you can also connect instagram with canva and then you can use your instagram photos in your canva account so that's really really good I love canva highly recommend it not only for teaching but also social I'm a social media marketing person so canva is a must a must good okay next up we have callen lee and this is also something I have not yet used but I will be using in the future but I hear a lot about okay there's one more question about canva so let me answer that real quick Jerome asks it seems more useful than powerpoint for presentations in teaching esol do you know if there's a limit to number of designs for the free account so with a free account you're just more limited in terms of you know what kind of templates you can use or there will be like pro templates and like some of the photos um are pro photos or like the shapes you can use but with a free account you can use you can do a lot of things um so I think a free account just for doing presentations is totally enough totally enough yeah and with the pro I think also the resize option so if you create one uh for example you do an insta story or you do an insta a facebook post format and then you want to resize that to a insta story with the pro it resizes it automatically but if you don't have the pro you need to kind of do more work for resizing that yourself um copy pasting from one to another but um just for doing presentations like the basic stuff a free account is totally um enough totally enough I had a free account for the first couple of years and then I got the pro account because I just needed those more those pro features for what I needed to do with also my website and stuff so yeah okay all right then let's move on to what I just mentioned Calendly um so what is Calendly it is basically a tool for scheduling classes so as you can see here basically it keeps track of your teaching schedule so if you this is especially perfect for when you work for different online companies so you can add all of your um classes uh into this one calendar and you have everything in one view you can also um add this to your own website so you can embed this on your website and then people will have the option to book your time slots so students can easily book your classes this way um you basically add your free time slots and they the students can then go ahead and book that so here as you can see um very simple not much uh to really explain about that but um it just kind of keeps everything in one place and it's just great if you uh you know for independent teachers if you're creating your own website um you want to go away from teaching platforms um because there are some pros and cons you know for working with teaching platforms obviously those teaching platforms they do um they do take a cut a pay cut from your salary so if you want to avoid that and you know if there's any minimum hours or anything that you're not happy with a lot of teachers then start going down the independent teaching route that's when you're going to need your marketing tools to market your own classes to market yourself as a teacher um and then Calendly is very useful so that you know students can just book your classes this way that's why I would recommend Calendly so yeah might not be an option or something that everybody needs um here but definitely if you are you know looking into teaching uh away from any platforms you should get Calendly and it is free so um you might as well have that or also just for yourself so you have all of your um classes if you're teaching on multiple platforms so you have all of your classes in one place yeah definitely useful for that um then let's have a look at we transfer uh probably most of you might already know this too this is a great free tool for sending files it's a web based file transfer service and it's perfect for sending large files so really really big files like video files or uh like music or like a large folder of files because usually you can't send those over email or anything um or you don't want to have that in your dropbox you don't want to have that in your um drive you just want to get it away to the person you want to send it to you don't want to have it saved in your take up space in your drive or in your cloud um then you can use we transfer so you just upload your files and then you enter the email address of the person you want to send it to and then they send it to you and yeah with the free one you can send up to two oh up to two gigabytes of stuff there's no registration either so you just need to put in your email address and I think they send you a confirmation email with like a code you put the code in and then you can send that without registration it's completely free up to two gigabytes as well so I use that a lot as well we use that at ITTT whenever some of you might have sent us a um video testimonial we always ask you to send it via we transfer uh so some of you might have done it in the past and send it to us so yeah if you have any large files you need to send we transfer is really really useful for that then we have number seven at modo and this is also something I have not personally used yet so if any one of you has have has used it let me know in the comments I'm very curious but I know a lot of people who are using it um and this is especially great for larger classes so I just teach private students one-on-one so I don't really felt a need to have this but it's basically great for sharing content with your students and as you can see on this picture it looks a lot like Facebook right it looks it reminds it just looks like Facebook let's just say it looks like Facebook um so basically it's a Facebook for uh the teacher and their students right so you can connect it connects students and teachers just like a social network just like Facebook let's just say it you can also set assignments you can share resources you can share homework on there I think you can also make polls ask questions to your students you can make groups you know like per class every class has their own separate group then on this platform um you can also test students you can give them quizzes and tests and you can also track um the students progress so um yeah I think this is especially great for teachers who teach larger classes uh groups of students if you only have private students I don't think or like you teach one-on-one I don't think one-on-one I don't think this is super necessary but as you can see here on the side it says groups so here are all the different classes students that you have and this would be the teacher profile and yeah here assignment quiz poll snapshot anything you can do so yeah if you teach uh more than one person or like a class then I recommend that and it's free yeah Juliana says it looks like my teaching portal cool yeah I think yeah a lot of these are modeled you know after Facebook I think because it's just everybody knows how to use it it's very user friendly and um just feels natural so yeah just wanted to mention that um might be useful for some people here then number eight we have loop so what is loop loop is great for student feedback it's a student feedback app and also works on desktop on a website so with loop you can get student feedback instantly you can receive student feedback right after your class they say it takes 30 seconds to take to get student feedback then now you're probably thinking like why should I bother with you know something like this but it's actually a great way to understand your teaching impact because it has the anonymity functionality so the your students are going to give you feedback anonymously they're going to feedback you anonymously and that's why um it's very useful because you really can get their honest opinions you know what they really think about your class and then you can make immediate changes in the classroom to support student learning and then to improve your teaching style oh to improve your teaching style and um yeah just figure out you know if because sometimes I feel like we think oh yeah you know my class is great I think the students are learning it's going well but in reality maybe the students think very differently and vice versa as well maybe sometimes you think oh today's class was not good or oh I don't think my students really enjoy this class but then you get really really great feedback and then you're like oh actually maybe I am a good teacher and I am doing a good job sometimes that's that can happen as well we sometimes feel insecure right as teachers as well so yeah loop is great for that to get feedback it's super super fast and for free and I think feedback is just something that's very important because it can definitely change your classes um boost also it can boost um your um your confidence in the classroom and it can also help you improve your teaching style and you know make it better for your students so yeah check out loop for feedback good we're almost through now so let me talk about the next one and this is one I also did not know before but I actually signed up for this teacher ru teacher ru what is teacher ru it's an online teacher community so this is only for teachers so it says it's a dedicated friendly space for teachers everywhere to connect share ideas and browse thousands of free resources so yeah you can browse resources you can share resources with other teachers which is always great you know I spend so many hours planning for lessons that's something like this is just so useful helpful you can support each other you share something they share something you can all use it together um so that is definitely great and time saving uh I think prepping classes you know takes the most time and with if you're teaching on a teaching platform where you have to prep your own classes the prepping time is not paid it's only the actual teaching time that obviously is paid so the less time you need to prep your classes the better because you're not getting paid for it so yeah on this you teachers they share posts and ideas and links to things and you know exercises and all this kind of stuff you can also stream live video from your teacher ru profile so or you can watch other people's live videos if they share you know something that they did they did a super awesome activity today and they share how it went and how you can do it in your classroom I mean great you can also follow and chat with like-minded educators and also join groups so there would be groups for different kinds of um you know subjects that you're teaching there would be an esl group there would be a french class there would be a spanish group there'd be a math group or whatever and um so yeah I think that's that's something really good and I'm excited to explore this more like I said I signed up um and I'm liking it so far so if any one of you is on teacher ru let me know and then I'll follow you or let me share my my profile we can all follow each other on there but yeah I think stuff like that oh I need to log in again oh I do I can't do that right now I think anyway I think my handle is lindegos east so if you're on teacher ru and you type in lindegos east you'll find me there and then follow me and I'll follow you back I would love to explore this platform more especially with you guys so maybe we can do this all together but have you heard about teacher ru before and have you used it let me know in the comments let me know real quick I'm very curious to know because I think this is really great that's a great idea whoever created this really really good job so no no one no problem maybe yeah like I said maybe you can sign up and then you can find me on there and we can follow each other then uh let's move on to number 10 the last tool that I'm mentioning today there will be a bonus tool um but this is uh the last one so Pinterest I already mentioned Pinterest a little bit um but Pinterest if you didn't know um is a great it's a social media basically it has kind of involved into a search engine so a lot of people they go to Pinterest and type in search terms and it's great for shopping um it's just a picture based um social media platform so for inspiration and then you can save these images in little folders they call them boards you pin a pin onto a board um and you save everything you save all of your ideas in one place and teachers how can teachers use this for lesson planning material so as you can see in my example here I just typed in simple past worksheet and there's a plethora of different worksheets that I can use I can save um so yeah and more inspiration so for example for kids regular verbs simple present and simple past it gives you a lot of ideas for activities and you can build your lesson planning around that you can also share your best boards with your students for example oh for example for example you can make a board for your class and then maybe if you're just doing simple past at the moment in your class you can add some worksheets in there that they can maybe do in their free time or you want them to pick two or three and do it for homework or something like that you can use it for that as well you could also use Pinterest for clever classroom design there's a lot of design stuff on there for classroom design and things like that for themes um Pinterest is really really really good for that um you just type in whatever you're looking for like classroom or back to school classroom ideas or something like that and so much will show up as well as so many worksheets and poster ideas posters for like the classroom as well so there's posters of like you know um like especially for ESL posters how to say like that the classroom rules something like that we raise our hand um we listen carefully we sit nicely and things like that there's posters um there's also really good ideas for activities uh you know anything that you can then make yourself or print out and have your students do so Pinterest is really great I know that it's been around for many many years and it started out for just like you know saving pretty pictures but now it's really a huge platform and especially ESL is huge on Pinterest so if you haven't checked that out yet I highly recommend it literally you can put any topic in the search bar anything and it'll spit out so many ideas that you can then use and it saves you a lot of time for your lesson planning which is what we're all here for like I said you're not most of the time you're not getting paid for lesson planning when it comes to online teaching so yeah you want to do it as quickly and as efficiently as possible okay and um yeah I know you already saw the bonus one which is PayPal which is like you're probably like okay we already know about PayPal but um yeah if you don't have a PayPal account you should probably get one and set one up if you're teaching online because most online teaching platforms they pay via PayPal that's just how it is because it's international it's around all all around the world for receiving payments so you can receive payments from around the world within seconds and also if you teach independently you know your students they can easily also pay via PayPal if you're not working for a platform your students are most likely going to have PayPal and be familiar with it so that's usually a really good way of payment if you are not in the same country or in the same place but just keep in mind that receiving money from outside of your country then PayPal will charge a small transaction fee this depends from country to country and also where your own PayPal account is registered in so it just always depends but usually the fees are very small and just PayPal continues to be very very efficient for online teachers to receive payments so just wanted to throw it out there at the end as sort of like a bonus um but yeah it's nothing new for most of you probably but oh and also maybe you didn't know that you can actually create a pay me I think it's pay me link PayPal me pay me I think it's called pay me link so I can just share a link with your student and then they click on the link and then they can select the amount they want to send you so it's also very efficient it's it's in the settings somewhere um you or you just google it I think it's pay me a PayPal pay me link or something and then you can I think even make your own custom link name so you can do like I don't know Juliana Huang teacher or something as your PayPal address for example so yeah there you have it 10 free tools and software that are super useful for online teachers um this is the end of this presentation now today's topic I hope you enjoyed it you learned something new I know some of the ones that I mentioned you probably all have heard of already and knew about but um those are just really the things that I as a teacher also use you know with PayPal and everything every online teacher pretty much uses those so they need to be on this list especially for people who are completely new to this um yeah find ittt online again if you're not yet Teflor T so certified do make use of that 30% off discount and I am going to share the link again into the comments so you can use that to get your discount and your lifetime job support with ittt we help you find jobs teaching English abroad and also online so um yeah and now is your time to shine and to ask questions if you have any um thank you so much for your feedback Jerome Jerome says I learned of several new tools and sites so thank you very much yeah thank you so much as well for sticking on to the end you really watched the whole thing Jerome thank you so much I appreciate that um that's very rewarding oh Pinterest did you think Pinterest was interesting yeah I think I feel like yeah I don't know Pinterest um most people if they haven't used Pinterest yet they just think oh it's like it's just you save pretty pictures but it's actually so useful for teachers it's one of the first things I always go to when I look for teaching material so definitely definitely useful for sure so yeah and which which um of the tools did you find the most interesting today let me know which of the tools did you find um the most interesting and you're definitely going to use after this so Jerome is going to use Pinterest a lot more after this what about you guys which one are you excited about using so I'm excited about using teacher rule actually um like I said I didn't know about it before but I signed up um and I'm really liking it so far I think it's really cool to connect with other teachers um to share ideas so um yeah which which one did you find particularly interesting and useful and are going to use in your teaching let me know oh yeah Luke canva yeah definitely I love canva so much so much and Luke I saw that you posted a question earlier so I'm going to get back to that since you're still here I was hoping you were still be you would still be here I'm going to answer that in just a minute um I didn't forget it I didn't overlook it so just bear with me one more minute and then I'm going to get back to that all right EG says I'm planning to check out my row in teacher rule as well cool so if you're in teacher rule find Linda goes east and add me follow me and I'll follow you back they do look interesting yeah also my row I really like that yeah Juliana Juliana wants to try my row and teacher rule awesome I think those are the best ones as well yeah my row and teacher rule okay cool what about the other other watchers viewers which ones did you find interesting I think also this list of of 10 tools is a good mix between you know the necessary tools that you need to have like PayPal and the Calendly and things like that like Google Docs and then the more like fun ones that you can use for your students and definitely those are my favorites as well as like my row and canva and and teacher rule yeah for sure okay good well thank you so much guys for your feedback and I hope everybody's going to have a lot of fun checking out those tools and now if you have any other questions I'm still going to be on just a little bit longer to make sure I answer any of your other questions that you might have so Luke had a question in the beginning and he's still there and was bearing with me so thank you so much for that Luke so this is Luke's question I was just wondering with this whole pandemic thing with COVID if vaccines will be mandated for teaching I know you might not know the specifics but I was just wondering if you knew something um I think it's still a little bit too early to really say anything so as of now I don't think there are any any rules or laws put in place from schools or governments that mandate their teachers to be vaccinated I don't think I haven't heard of anything but what I can tell you here in South Korea teachers were among the earlier groups who got vaccinated so they definitely want to make sure teachers are vaccinated and yeah I mean I haven't heard of anything you know that it's a requirement but obviously a lot of countries have changed regulations to where if you are vaccinated you can skip quarantine and I can imagine that for schools who hire teachers from abroad if they can avoid having their new teacher be stuck in quarantine that's something that they probably prefer so you know take with that what you will so yeah can't really say anything I think it's still too early because also different countries they are in a different journey in terms of vaccinating at the moment um there are no rules for that so yeah but um you know schools abroad are still hiring you can still go abroad and teach there are no restrictions for that so yeah all right hi Marcia Marcia says hi Linda I couldn't see the whole live so I'll watch it later I use usually use Pinterest awesome yeah hi okay yeah yeah I see that for sure a lot of people are hesitant yeah sure but what I'm saying is you know a lot of employers if they hire teachers from abroad and uh vaccinated people can skip quarantine do you think the school would rather hire you know someone who needs to be stuck in quarantine for two weeks or someone who can skip quarantine and start working earlier I don't I don't know that's I think how a lot of schools especially in Korea probably think you know but um yeah I don't think it's too much of a problem it's still I can't really speak to that so it's just my opinion I think it's still too early to see anything but um yeah good does anybody have any other questions before I go love to answer them yeah I could come two weeks earlier to be ready when I start yes you could definitely definitely so I mean that's just my opinion um yeah I don't think it's much of a problem though you know we'll just have to wait and see for sure there's no uh law at the moment where they only hire vaccinated teachers now just nothing like that right now all right Marcia I use Pinterest to get some extra material because here in Chile we have textbooks to teach not so good but we have to use them yeah I mean sure I think it's good to maybe not only use the textbooks and then also like what you're doing add some additional material like some something fun because usually textbook stuff let's be honest is not that fun so yeah all right I think I might take one more question and then I'm going to sign up for today this session was already very long today but I loved it and I'm glad that you guys also learned something fun today and um yeah let's all meet on teacheroo oh my pronunciation vaccinated vaccinated oh no that's how I say it vaccinated vaccinated is that vaccineed it's vaccinated though I'm pretty sure all right good um I just want to repeat that we are live every week so me once a week and then my colleague Lisa once a week so also do check her out especially if you are a non-native English speaker um she is a non-native English teacher from Russia she taught English in China she's teaching English online she's back in Russia now she has a lot of great ideas she knows a lot more about actually online teaching than I do so do check her out I only started teaching online this year in March um and I just I learned a lot from her actually so that's why I said um check out our playlist she did a lot of previous live sessions about uh different platforms and my row she did a lot about my row um yeah so do check her out check out our playlist browse the previous sessions and then I hope I'll see you all again next week um I'm gonna see what I'm gonna talk about next week I don't know yet usually um I think about that on Monday or Tuesday what I'm gonna think about what I'm gonna talk about on Friday so but if you have any suggestions as always feel free to let me know you can comment below or you can also just send me a message Instagram at Linda goes east and let me know what you want me to talk about next if you have any wishes I'm always open to take to taking suggestions um so yeah thank you so much for watching I saw that so many of you stayed all the way until the end I so appreciate that um I know it's a long session it always goes by so fast for me um I don't know how it is for you but um it goes by really quick but um yeah I hope you're gonna have a super duper awesome weekend um and I will see you again next week hopefully um I love seeing all of these regular faces and new faces I appreciate you and um thanks so much for watching again don't forget to like and subscribe so you don't miss any of our future sessions and then I am signing off for today and I hope to see you all again next week all right bye guys bye