I'm an ESL teacher based in Milan and I've been teaching online now and since we first went into lockdown last February.
I have to admit I was a little apprehensive about making the move to online lessons at first, but now I see there are definitely some advantages, for example, one of my first new courses was a mixed group of students based in 4 different cities and towns around Italy, something which obviously just wouldn't have been possible in a physical classroom.
Anyway, one thing I was struggling with was how best to share material with students in an online environment. I often found myself wanting to share PDFs of material that I would usually just print out for a normal lesson and for a while I used Google drive or emailed material to students beforehand. I found this to be a bit time confusing and it added an extra workload to my lesson preparation (not needed!). From the students point of view, they had to deal with trying to edit pdfs in a document reader and it was frustrating for them, particularly some of the adult students who weren't so tech-savvy!
I really missed just being able to present material to students, in the moment, at the right time during the lesson, and have them be able to interactive with it, just like they used to with old fashioned pen and paper.
So, with the help of a friend (who's an expert computer programming genius!) we developed an online app to do just that. It's called Thinkio and I've been using it for the last 2 months or so now and it's really helped me streamline this whole aspect of my lessons. (I realise this post smells super spammy, but honestly that's not my intention
)I just wanted to see if anyone else was having similar issues and if so, feel free to give Thinkio a go! It's absolutely free and I'd love to hear any feedback you might have regarding your experience (if you find it as useful as I did, if you'd like to see different features in the future etc.)
The way it works is basically you can upload a pdf, or image (like a jpg, png, screenshot) and it lets you share a url link with students via the chat on the lesson platform (I tend you use zoom), they can open it in their browser and start writing and drawing on it straightaway. All changes are made automatically and they can even come back to it and continue working outside of lesson time, which is nice for setting homework. Once they're done, they can save a hard copy by printing a pdf in the browser's print function.
You can get started at www.thinkio.it and if you have any questions just fire away on here or at the "contact us" button on the website (it comes thorough to me anyway) and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.
Happy teaching!
Daniel Tanner