The way we educate after the pandemic has changed drastically. Before the pandemic, in-company business English classes were a great way to build international teams and grow your business. Now, It’s not as common to go into offices and teach business English classes. Today, online business English classes are the way to go.
Various tools can help you teach classes online.—the most popular tool being Zoom. We’ll share some helpful tips to help you teach and engage with your students using Zoom.
Online Business English Classes – Zoom Tips
Share Screen
The most useful tool for teaching online is the Share Screen Feature. With this feature, you’re able to use a vast array of online resources to complement your lesson plan. If you’re talking about negotiation, for example, you can share a recent article from Forbes and have students write down new vocabulary words, phrasal verbs, or idioms throughout the article.
Whiteboard
Just like in your typical classroom, the Whiteboard feature allows you to write or draw anything on a digital whiteboard. White down exercises, and pictures, play games, and have students participate to increase engagement. A great exercise is playing Pictionary with recent business idioms. While teaching your online business English class, have students draw new business idioms such as Ballpark Figure and let the other students guess what it is.
Polls
Polls are a great way to measure students’ learning. You can create various types of questions in your lesson plan. Matching, single-answer questions, and multiple choice questions can help you assess student progress.
Breakout Rooms
Breakout Rooms are particularly great for classes of 6 or more participants. In larger classes, you’ll have more speaking opportunities if you use breakout rooms. While a little complicated to set up, it’s a great way to have students talk, work on presentations, and brainstorm. Make sure to turn on the feature in your web browser first. Once you do that, you can create breakout rooms automatically or manually. In other words, you can choose which students to add to specific rooms, or have Zoom pick for you.
Annotate
The ability to annotate while sharing your screen makes teaching extremely productive. When using online resources like books or exercises, be sure to annotate but drawing lines for matching exercises, writing down words for fill-in-the-blanks, or using shapes to circle answers. Participants are able to see everything you annotate on your end, which allows them to copy down answers and participate accordingly.
Games
Zoom allows participants to play games right in the app. Remember that you’ll have to have students download the game app as well. For easier use, find online games that you can use in your online class: Skribbl.io, Kahoot!, Gartic Phone, and Cards Against Humanity are great games to practice vocabulary, idioms, and phrasal verbs.
Opt-in for Zoom Classes at English Services
English Services uses Zoom as its main platform to teach online classes. While we adjust to your company’s preferences, Zoom is a great way to engage students.
To find out more about our online business English classes, click here.
