Issue 37

Tuesday Edition

Author

David Skaife
September 10, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

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Facebook

😑📘Koala Teachers Family recap

A slow week on the Facebook group

Playground

 🛝🛠️Dunk The Teacher - Shapes $3

Now available on the Marketplace, a new version of Dunk The Teacher. So far this is my most popular style of game, there are several versions. Scroll to the bottom of the article to check those other versions out.

This time we are spelling the names of shapes from a verbal description. The shapes include:

  • Circle

  • Oval

  • Triangle

  • Square

  • Rectangle

  • Pentagon

  • Hexagon

  • Heptagon

  • Octagon

Now if you still don’t see content that works for you, let me know and maybe I can make it, or watch this video to see that it isn’t that difficult to change the content. One teacher made over 40 versions for their own classroom usage!!

Other Dunk The Teacher titles:

Now go buy something! it’s only $3😆

Teaching Tools

👩🏻‍🏫🛠️The new and updated Koala Business Plan has a much lower threshold to qualify

The Koala Team just held a webinar with the new updates to the Koala Business Plan,  also covered was a new Small Business plan.

Starting on the small end, The Small Business plan, this plan is for a business that just has a couple of teachers and usually less than 100 hours/mo. 

Benefits of the Small Business Plan:

  • Instead of paying for all your teachers accounts separately or reimbursing them, Koala can charge your business account.

  • You can share activities with those accounts. This allows you to have the same activities and Playgrounds available for all your teachers.

The price for this plan appears to be just the monthly or yearly subscription cost times the number of accounts needed.

For the regular or full Business Plan they have removed the minimum number of tutors and lowered the minimum hours to a very reasonable 100 hours/mo. Even I qualify for that most months

Benefits of the Business Plan:

  • Shared activities, so everyone has access to the same materials and curriculum.

  • Cloud recording, you can choose to record all of your classes or none, there is a small fee per hour for this service. Videos are stored online and you can download them.

  • Dashboard for adding and removing teachers, seeing who taught what to who and for how long, plus links to class recordings if you have that option, the cost for each class and a running total for the month.

  • Replace the Koala Go branding with your own, this is often called white labeling. The examples shown of this were quite nice.

  • Hosting on your own website, Koala will host it for you or you can host it yourself, no extra charge either way.

Additionally on the billing, the rate is around a dollar an hour and it is calculated by the minute, you are not charged for any minutes unless a student is in class with you, very cool. However, with group classes you will be charged the hourly rate for each student. If your company doesn’t reach that 100 hour mark you will still be billed for 100 hours, fair enough. That’s a lot of functionality for a low price.

These new changes are certainly welcome and put the Koala Go Business Plan within reach of most businesses even those just starting out.

If you are interested in discussing these plans with the Koala crew send Chloe an email and tell her you read about it in Koala Bites!

These lower requirements make me start to think

Editorial

✍️🃏Editorial: Perspective, and it is amazing what people can get used to 

At the end of my conversation classes we do a short verbal presentation on an IELTS test topic. The topic this day was “Describe a time when you solved a problem using a computer”. I have had many different things discussed by students on this topic but none  quite as different as this student. This student is in Ukraine, his “problem” was Russians hiding in a forest. He described in some detail how he used various software and AI to enhance satellite and drone images to predict locations giving grid locations to fire artillery. The conclusion of his presentation was “No more Russians hiding in the forest, problem solved”. This student is middle-aged, had a career in software development, was a team leader and is very interesting to have discussions with, but now like most of the men left in Ukraine he is in the army. We have covered game-theory, psychology, history, sci-fi, and many, many other varied and obscure topics. He is practicing his English so he can better communicate with Ukraine’s partners in the UK, US and other countries.

Image created by Gemini

Having students in Israel and Ukraine can change your perspective on world events.

⬇️⬇️ 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. 😆

Weekly Poll

👋🏾Well that’s it for this issue

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