When I started out teaching English online, the most consistent advice I received from friends, youtubers and other teachers was: ‘write as many corrections as possible in the chat window.’ This proved to be sound advice, providing a way to pick up minor mistakes without interrupting the conversation flow and leaving the student notes to revisit when the lesson is completed. However, after some time teaching, I identified some areas in which the chat window was lacking. These are as follows:
Spelling:
I have never been a masterful speller, sometimes I even manage to mess up simple words. As embarrassing as that may be for an English teacher, I place my failings in this area down to the fact that I grew up relying on word processors with spellchecks, predictive texting and google. However, this became a serious issue for me when correcting students, as on most platforms the spellcheck feature is far from ideal. In addition, once the message is sent there is no going back, now you must use the dreaded * symbol to make your own mistake glaringly obvious, keep doing this and quite soon your student will start questioning whether you are really the best person to be teaching them a language of which you seem to have so little grasp. With Google Docs however there is no such issue, simply send the link to the document and use that to provide corrections, just as you would in the chat window. The best part is that often google will automatically correct misspelled words and your students will not even notice your orthographic incompetence.
Lesson Planning:
I like to include lots of activities during my lessons, such as reading tasks, describing and comparing images and grammar tasks, to name just a few. Rather than just share my screen when looking at the material Google Docs allows the student to edit the document for themselves. When I teach IELT preparation, I use Docs to type out my student’s answers to mock test questions, this allows us to revisit their response and consider how they might improve their answer. They can then look at these corrections after class has finished and practice using any phrases I may have suggested. This brings us nicely to our third point…
Homework:
Google Docs is brilliant for homework assignments. I try to limit writing tasks during my lessons as, more often than not, the student is paying to practice talking with a native English speaker, not to have the native speaker sit in silence while he or she writes an essay. For that reason, I normally set a writing homework for the student, sometimes this is as simple as describing a picture, or writing about an experience. Docs provides a place for the student to work and allows me to monitor progress. If the student has a question about the task before the next lesson, it is very easy for me to check in and help and normally we will review the work together at the beginning of the next lesson.
