🤖🐉In this issue🐨🫦

• Koala Teachers Family FB Weekly Recap

• Playground launch: Olympics 24

• Popcorn the Storyteller: part 3

• Editorial: How to start your online teaching business?

• User Submissions

Facebook

😑📘Koala Teachers Family recap

Somebody asking about spinners in Koala Go, this happens almost every month, this is my workaround

Barton tutors: Literacy Classroom 6: A Silent-E Syllable Template is live on the Koala Go Marketplace

The Koala Go team pushed out a big stability update

Marketplace bug quickly swatted

FREE professional development resources for literacy teachers, advocates, and classroom interventionists/specialists.

Webinar: Want to know how Deanna teaches writing in Koala Go?

Playground launch

🛝🚀 Olympics 24

Another great Playground from Dawn Harmon. This time she pulled out all the stops, there are so many different activities and types of learning content all centered around the Olympic Games. From ancient to modern Olympic histories, there are puzzles, mazes, national anthems, flags, reading comprehension , listening, matching, a timeline… all the things we have come to expect from Dawn’s Playgrounds.

To open the Playground you light the Olympic torch then the learning can begin, 8 different exercises that should each fit nicely into a 25 minute class (give or take). All different, all well presented. 

That’s just the learning activities, in the center of the Playground are 8 different, challenging and fun Playground games to test student’s and teacher’s Playground skills.

During our tour Dawn said that this Playground was built for older students, A2 and above. The reason for this was that there weren’t very many Playgrounds for that age group, I would tend to agree. Lower level students could probably do a few of the exercises, especially with help, but everyone can enjoy the games area!! 

Below you can watch the video or download a PDF with all the details of the exercises.

AI Tools

🤖🤫Popcorn the Storyteller: part 3

This is part 3 of building a personality and purpose for Popcorn.

While I was waiting in class for an adult student (an adult, but they love games) I started to have Popcorn write a story for her, I knew that she liked to play pool so I had Popcorn use that for the setting. The story was actually pretty good, I then quickly generated a few images to go along with the different sections, quick and dirty…The student actually missed the class, but I sent this PDF version, she loved it and we used it for our reading practice in the next class.

Meanwhile, with my young student we continue to make new stories in class, with the student making the decisions, very interactive. When we go into Playground for Dunk the Teacher spelling fun she gets super excited to see Popcorn, her friend, who has shared many adventures with her.

Enjoy!!

Editorial

✍️🃏Editorial: How to start your online teaching business?

I have wanted to write about this topic for a while. Might receive some hate for it but I’m going to write it anyway.

There are several programs that claim to get you all set-up to start your own tutoring business and successfully go solo. Some are an investment, some are expensive! Most of them have tons of valuable information in them that is helpful, I believe all of them mean well. However, The majority of the people offering these courses have almost the same origin story, a story that just isn’t possible under the current market situation. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Invent a Time Machine

2. Build the Time Machine

3. Go back in time, get a degree in teaching

4. Teach at a brick and mortar school for several years

5. Start teaching online during the peak of the Chinese boom where you could teach as many hours as you wanted at a starting rate of $20-25/hr

6. When the Chinese schools collapse overnight, you simply poach your students and take them with you.

7. Take advantage of the surge in online teaching during COVID

8. Build your business by referrals, word-of-mouth and social media

9. Oh, and don’t forget to choose a niche market, and charge what you are worth.

It’s a bit harder to start nowadays in my opinion. Sure, you can work for one of those Chinese schools, but you are going to hate it, things are just not the same now. Low entry wages (decreasing every month), incompetent staff, poop for curriculum, only a few paid hours a week,  and zero job security. Not to mention all the scam companies out there preying on the multitudes of new teachers that are desperate to get a start.

Unfortunately, that is where you need to start if you have no experience. I classified that time as a badly paid internship where I did actually learn quite a bit. Many of the things I learned were how NOT to run a company.

Next I started with Preply as an intermediate step to forming my own business, not expecting much as I had heard nothing good about these platforms from “successful” teachers. Most citing the commission as being too high, and it is kind of high, but for me 80% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

I cast a pretty wide net to start as far as types of classes went, and charged the same low rate I got at the last school, just to get the ball rolling, Since then I have raised my rate twice. I didn’t really find my niche, but I think one may have found me. Most of my current students are seeking the same sort of lessons, so I built a curriculum around that.

Creating my own company is still on the table as I know a lot more after a year in the trenches. But I am certainly not going to rush it. I think I still have a lot to learn and more connections to make before I could make a success out of it.

I started one of these courses months ago and learned some helpful information, probably the most valuable was that I wasn’t even ready to take the course yet. I simply didn’t know enough about what I wanted to do to actually form a plan and execute it.

At the end of the day, these programs and courses certainly can help you get started, but it is a different world for people starting today. Don’t expect to be able to follow in footsteps that just don’t exist anymore. It’s going to be hard going and you won’t always have somebody to break trail for you.

I will cover how these images were created for this article in a future article. Only took a couple of minutes!!

⬇️⬇️ User Submissions ⬇️⬇️

Playground

💧👩🏻‍🏫Seeking content for Dunk The Teacher and Escape the planet

Do you like the concept behind these games but they don’t have the right content for you? Send me an email about it.

My original plan was to offer many different versions with the content that teachers like yourself wanted (each version at $3), but since I cannot read minds I need you to tell me what you need. 😆

Submissions

🙋🏽‍♂️🤷🏻‍♀️How do I submit my Playground to be featured in Koala Bites?

If you have a Playground you would like to have in this newsletter, or for that matter, anything the readers might find useful. Just click that button that says “Submissions”. That will open an email for you to describe what you would like to submit.

I like to schedule a time where I can come to your classroom and tour the Playground. Then I will do a short write-up. There is no cost for this.

Bye-bye

👋🏾Well that’s it for this issue

Don’t forget to share it with your friends or on social media!