Preparing Classes Using Zoom and Ayotree tools

1. PREPARING CLASSES
USING ZOOM AND
AYOTREE TOOLS
Zoni Online Courses

2. Course Outline
Selecting the Material
Considerations
DOD Syndrome
Pitfalls
Resources
List of ESL websites that offer
relevant material
Upload to Ayotree
Save bandwidth by uploading
your lessons to Ayotree
Sharing Whiteboard
Using the whiteboard tool

3. Selecting the material
Considerations
• Relevance to syllabus or topic of discussion
• Relevance to students
• Appropriateness. Preview and filter the
material, especially videos. Avoid themes such
as politics, sex, and religion. A lot of the
material available online is aimed at American
students, so the speed in which they speak and
certain topics are not appropriate, and neither
is the vocabulary.
• Analyze the final product and keep in mind the
students need to learn something from it.
Whenever possible, practice the 4 skills with
each activity.
Survey students on what they have learned
from the lesson. This step will help you prepare
the next lessons.

4. Avoid the DOD
syndrome
Sometimes, a lesson has all that is
needed to become a successful class,
but it is damaged on delivery by
teacher’s lack of planning:
• Inappropriateness of content
• Inability to organize the material on the
computer, which causes a long deadly
silence
• Inappropriate or insensitive content, e.g.,
there was an earthquake in Mexico a few
days ago, thousands of people were killed,
and the planned lesson talks about
vacation resorts in Mexico, or worse, it
compares resorts in Mexico vs the
Dominican Republic, where there has
been a deadly hurricane recently.

5. English as Second Language Resources
Some ESL resources are listed below. Please preview the
material, since some could be considered inappropriate or
offensive to some people:
◦ YouTube, Vimeo, songs with missing words for students to
complete (cloze exercise)
◦ http://iteslj.org/questions/ Conversation topics for the
ESL/EFL classroom
◦ http://www.Allthingstopics.com (one of my personal
favorites)
◦ http://www.Allthingsgrammar.com
◦ https://en.islcollective.com/
◦ http://www.socrative.com
◦ https://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ (Russel Stannard’s
website)
◦ https://breakingnewsenglish.com/ (Links to several other
resource sites)
◦ https://conversationstartersworld.com/good-questions-to-ask/
o https://www.nytimes.com/section/learning
o www.eslprintables.com
o conversationstartersworld.com
o www.english-guide.org/
o Lessons prepared by other teachers that have been uploaded to
YouTube, Vimeo, and other services, usually with the grammar
topic as the name of the lesson.
o Samples are:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnONBkEQUU0;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liAsT4DqalQ;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILzMvSd1FQ;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_RH5VcBsO8
(superlatives with fast and slow))
o Azar material (worksheets, expansion activities, vocabulary sheets,
song lessons, Power Point presentations, and more):
http://www.azargrammar.com/materials/uueg/UUEG_TchrCreate
d.html
o Teacher Com: https://vk.com/teachercom

6. Upload to Ayotree
• Save space and bandwidth by uploading
your lessons to Ayotree course forum
• Use the Quiz tool on Ayotree

7. Sharing is the key
• Share Whiteboard when:
• Giving quick explanations
• Spelling new words
• Teaching new structures
• Asking students to spell words
• And more
• Share Reading materials and pictures from the
book, websites, or selected articles
• Do not use long articles that do not lead to
discussion
• Ask pre-reading questions
• Ask students to read paragraphs, describe pictures
(use the before, during, and after technique)
• Ask comprehension questions

8. THANK YOU!