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I am 26 years old, and December 2022 will be my ninth anniversary of teaching ESL online. When I turned eighteen, I went by myself to Taiwan. I’ve always been very adventurous, and I decided I wanted to stay and live in Asia, so I got my first ESL job after being there for two weeks and have continued teaching ever since. Since then, I have traveled and taught ESL in more than ten countries. My current titles: I am the Founder and Curriculum Director for ESLedb.com.
For many online ESL teachers, 2021 presented new and unique challenges after China’s tutoring policy shift. Firms cannot hire tutors based inside and outside of China. Many famous Chinese teaching platforms either significantly reduced their pay rates or shut their schools down. This uncertainty led many teachers to quit teaching altogether.
Many online ESL teachers took this as an opportunity to start their own online tutoring businesses. I was one of these teachers. Fortunately, I had several eager students to follow me to independent classes.
Everyone is scared and nervous at first. It won’t be easy, and there is a learning curve. But I promise it isn’t as hard as you think. When I taught for large teaching companies, I used to get very burned out teaching. That no longer happens. I am a much happier teacher and a person teaching independently.
However, making fun and practical lessons by oneself can be challenging. An English teacher’s tool kit can consist of many tools, such as pre-made lesson plans, useful exercises, homework sheets, and more.
I researched every platform and booked demos with multiple platforms. ClassIn has the most versatile online classroom components, in my opinion. Also, it was created with education as its sole purpose, which shines through to students and parents. It provides a fun learning environment that is also structured and professional. In contrast, other online meeting platforms either lack interactivity, a classroom feeling, or due to over-gamification, lacks professionalism.
When I was looking for an engaging ESL curriculum, I soon discovered that there were no available online teaching curricula – especially those that were dynamic and interactive and could be used on virtual platforms such as ClassIn.
To engage our students with better lessons, I decided to team up with other teachers and content creators to create a simple, intuitive, and user-friendly online ESL curriculum. Since February 2022, our team and I have created this NoPrep ESL curriculum on ESLedb.com.
By May 2022, the site has over 140 individual 25-minute lessons to produce upwards of 600 individual classes. These thoughtfully organized lessons are grouped by proficiency level/theme and help cut down on teacher prep time by including suggested homework for every lesson from Level 1 and up.
We also provide stand-alone activity lessons for students of all levels. Each single lesson could be used as a one-off class or supplement existing curriculums.
The curriculum is available in EDB format, which offers interactivity and further customization in a relatively small file size and can be used on the ClassIn teaching platform. EDB files are designed to be interactive, engaging, and fun and aren’t hard to make. The lessons are also available in PDF format for use on platforms that do not allow for as much interactivity as ClassIn.
The best long-term benefit of being a part of a teacher community is the support between teachers. Whether you’re having difficulty with something technical, with payments, game ideas, class topics, or how to assist a student with something particular, someone out there has gone through what you’re going through and is willing to help you figure it out.
I love assisting new teachers in making the jump to become independent as well as established independent teachers. An essential part of being a teacher is learning, and I’m so grateful to the teachers who assisted me when I needed it and taught me how to do something new and valuable to help my students better.
