Virtual Classrooms a Teacher’s Perspective

Virtual Classroom – a Teacher’s Perspective

"I've always been a fairly techy person, but I'd never been one for web conferencing or anything like that. So I admit that despite teaching English for several years, mostly on a 1-to-1 basis, I was still nervous about teaching using a Virtual Classroom. As if there weren't enough potential issues to deal with when teaching a client, I could do without adding the contribution of Mr Gates and his "blue screen of death" to the equation. Besides, even if it worked without technical problems, isn't the webcam image too jerky and the audio too delayed to be of any help in language teaching? Indeed, isn't the whole "online English" lesson too clunky to be anything but inferior to that of the in-person 1-to-1 class?

Well, the short answer is no. Teaching using a Virtual Classroom is fairly intuitive, although it does help if you don't worry about the way the class is delivered, but rather on the content of your classes. After all, there isn't much difference between "sharing a document" and showing a document to a student in person. Or between "sharing an application" and asking the student to write something down or complete a gap fill. So once you get past that slight fear of unknown technology and realise that despite the interface it's still essentially the 1-to-1 teaching that we have done for so long, it becomes a lot easier.

Indeed, in some ways it's superior to "traditional classroom" teaching. In the Virtual Classroom you can present lessons using PowerPoint presentations, Word documents or the Whiteboard. Vocabulary can quickly be explained using Google Images rather than a scratchy drawing on the board. Students can move from conversational work to writing exercises to interactive Flash-based exercises at the click of a button, rather than having to queue outside the IT room, wait for the computer to warm up, and so on (something I'm sure we've all experienced in our school-based lessons).

Perhaps the only difference between teaching in the Virtual Classroom and teaching in the traditional classroom is that you have to perhaps be slightly better prepared than for classroom teaching. After all, all of your resources have to be in electronic format as Word documents, pdfs or PowerPoint presentations. You can't rush to the resources room and photocopy something or grab an activity from the bottom of your bag if your lesson is running short. But again, "having to be prepared" is hardly a bad thing, and is obviously another benefit from the clients' point of view.

Overall, I'm very impressed with the Virtual Classroom, both how easy it is to use, but also how flexible and versatile it is. And I can attest that despite never any nearer than several hundred miles from your student, you still build a good relationship with them very quickly. The webcam really isn't a barrier to getting to know them.

So my experiences of teaching using the Virtual Classroom have been wholly positive. In fact, the only thing that I'm still not used to is spending an hour with a student, seeing what's going on outside their office windows several hundred miles away one moment, then standing in my kitchen, post-class, making a cup of coffee the next. It makes you realise that nowadays the world really is very small indeed. But then, if that's the case, why not take advantage of it?"

James Burkes
Comments and response welcome:info(at)my-english-teacher(dot)-com-

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