Teach English Online: find students and start teaching now

You will learn about the toolkit that is essential to teaching English online successfully, including the hardware and software, and most of all, the importance of you.

It's not just about Skype! You will look at some of the different ways you can communicate with your students, and how to use the tools that comes with them.

You will find out why an online whiteboard is your friend, and how to use some of the best online whiteboards on the Internet.

IDroo is one of my favourite online whiteboards. In this video I will show you how to use all the basic tools on IDroo.

NOTE: since making this video, IDroo has reduced the tools available on a free account, so some of the tools I show can no longer be used on a free account. However, I've left the video up as an example of how online whiteboards in general can be used.

Learn about the extra tools in IDroo, including how to add images and documents to the whiteboards, and how to share the whiteboard with your students.

Watch me create an activity for a student using an IDroo; in this video I show you how to create a simple anagram activity which can be used as a 3 minute warmer activity.

In this lecture I'll help you decide what kinds of lessons you could teach, why you should do this before you even start looking for students, and the core idea of value in your lessons.

You'll learn why teaching to a specific niche of students is the most lucrative and easiest way forward, an area I call Niche English. I'll lead you through the process of thinking about what niche you could teach and the kinds of lessons you can offer, lessons that meet the needs of a particular part of the massive English language market. Do you want to teach doctors and nurses, to prepare students for exams, to teach business English...or even Star Wars fans? This lecture explains how you can do it.

In this lecture I will take you through some of the most effective strategies for finding students.

Learn how to use social media to find students...and it's not just Facebook!

In this lecture I will provide you with a model for deciding what rates of pay you want to charge based on how specialized your course is and how you found your students.

You will get 5 great tips for getting paid effectively, including a suggestion to offer courses rather than lessons.

In this lecture I'll take you through some of the more common, and less common, ways of getting paid online, from PayPal to Western Union and beyond.

Online English teachers can work from the comfort of their own home, but it's also something you can do on your travels. I'll explain how you can do both, and take you through the concept of location independence and explain how you can live cheaply while taking on the highest paying students in the world.

This lecture gives an overview of the second half of the course, which focuses on helping you teach the different language skills of English. It also gives a quick overview of how languages are actually learned, and how this impacts on your role as a teacher.

Knowing what your student wants and needs, and what their interests are, is an important first step in creating successful and effective lessons. In this lecture I'll tell you how. You can also download a couple of needs analysis questionnaires to send to your students.

You will find out some key tips and techniques for teaching speaking effectively, including how to use open questions and how to develop your student's accuracy and fluency. You will also learn how to make the most of conversations in a lesson.

Here are 10 of my favourite and most effective activities for helping students develop their speaking skills in your lessons. These include a 'describe and draw' information gap activity, reformulation and ranking activities.

This lecture will explain what role plays are, and how to use them in your lessons.

In this lecture you'll learn some essential tips and techniques to help you develop your students' listening skills. I'll take you step-by-step through a typical listening activity and tell you what to do if your student still doesn't understand. In the downloadable resources section, there's a list of great websites where you can find high quality listening materials.

In this lecture you'll learn how to put a reading lesson together, and how to make a text more comprehensible for your students.

"Breaking News English" is an excellent, free website to find reading materials and activities. In this video I give you a quick tour of the website and look at some of the texts, interactive activities and text-based lessons available on the site.

Text sorting activities are simple but effective ways of helping your student improve their reading skills. In this screencast, I show you a text sorting activity, set up using an online whiteboard, IDroo.

To see how to create this activity, watch my IDroo user guide videos in the section entitled "The Essential Toolkit"

Paragraph sorting activities are very effective ways of helping your student improve their reading skills. In this screencast, I show you how to create and use a paragraph sorting activity, using text from a coursebook PDF together with the online whiteboard, IDroo.

In this video I go through some more reading activities, including matching, prediction and comprehension activities, plus some activities that use pictures to support students' reading skills.

Find out some great reading materials that you can find online to use with your students. Check out the resources section for links to these resources.