How to set up your Virtual Classes (VC)
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Introduction to Virtual Classes
Dear colleague,
Here you will find all information necessary to start building your online classes for your existing real-life students with our e-learning solution for ESL/EFL students. No matter where you are in our global village. No matter how many classes you have. No matter how many students there are in your classes. You can start building a mirror image of your classes, write your students online or printable exercises. If the students do the exercises online, they and you can see their results and their progress. This service is absolutely free. We live from advertisements and I am a philanthropist. Similar services, and be assured none as good as this one, cost hundreds of dollars per teacher. With Nonstop English you can create unlimited number of classes. In one class you can have unlimited number of students. You can write one exercise in less than half an hour or use our pool of ready made exercises and share the exercises between classes by the press of a button. You can recycle the exercises year after year and this tool is also useful if you teach in more than one school (not so unusual these days) or also if you are a private teacher giving individual classes one to one (I teach one to one myself). The exercises are self generating. All you need to do is to specify the words you want the students to practise, add the definition of the words and an example sentence for each word (this is only necessary if the word is not yet in our database). Are you using a course book? Are you teaching Business English or any specialized English vocabulary? Have you always wished to have a tool that will make it easy to practise the vocabulary the students have just learned? Have you always wished to be able to prepare an exercise to 'Quick test' the students home preparation at the beginning of a lesson? If your answer is YES to any of the above, you have come to the right place. Please follow the steps below to crate your account and to learn about this program. I believe that once you try our exercise generating tool, you will not want to use any other.
Happy teaching!
Las Bujdoso
on behalf of
Nonstop English Team
www.nonstopenglish.com
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Create your e-learning account
Go to http://www.nonstopenglish.com/login/signup.asp?member=teacher. Enter your login name, email address and password and you are ready to start. Please choose a login name that is easy to remember and use only English letters and digits. Use a one-word login name. Do not use space or any other characters, just letters and digits. Your login name is your and your students' start page. If your name is Charles Brown, your login name might be CharlesBrown or CharlesB or CBrown. Login name is not case sensitive so CharlesBrown is the same as charlesbrown and ChArLeSbRowN. The start page of your project will be www.nonstopenglish.com/vc/charlesbrown. You need to confirm registration and now you can log in to your account.
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Start building your classes
After successful registration and login you need to go to http://nonstopenglish.com/vc. There you can see five menu items.
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Manage your classes
Click on 'Add new class' link to create a class of your own. Give it a simple and easy to remember name. The recommended syntax to create your class is school-year-class where school is the name of the school (especially recommended if you teach in more than one school) year is the grade of the class and class is the variable of the same grade. Example: pt-3-math (Politechnique-3rd year- students of mathematics). You can of course use, just as I do, fancy names like ThePredators, RapidKids, Charmers (At any case make sure that you do not forget who 'Charmers' are, especially if you are going to create many classes.) or if you teach one to one you can use the name of the student. You can also create a class name like 'Headway-pre-intermediate' in case you teach many classes from Headway pre-intermediate course book and you want to create vocabulary exercises for that book.
You can create as many classes as you want or find manageable.
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Manage your students
(This process is quite complex for the students but they need to do it only once. So I recommend that first you try it out yourself to be able to describe this process to your students based on your experience.)
To add students to your class you need to give your students your email address and they need to register with Nonstop English at http://www.nonstopenglish.com/login/signup.asp?member=student. Ask the students to use a login name that will make it easy for you to recognize which student belongs to which class. After they register they need to log in and click on 'Personal data' link. They must edit their profile by adding your email address to 'Your teacher's email address' field and press the submit button. By this the student asks for permission to join one of your classes. Every time a student asks for permission you receive an email to inform you.
Now you can go to your 'Manage your students' page and add the student to ONE of your classes. You can change the students class later when he/she starts participating in another class. (Moves to a higher class after a year or starts studying from a different class book).
On the 'Manage your students' page you can also send emails to individual students by clicking on their email address or by filling in the form you can send a bulk email to all students in any of the classes.
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Create an exercise for one of your classes
You can try this service with the following words:
grandparents, immediately, important, university, birthday, funeral, little, million, present, tobacco, crash, earn, hate, kiss, later, leave, lose, lucky, marry, tear
Click on this link to create an exercise (later you will see that it is not one but many).
You can see two text boxes. Enter the words you want the students to practise in this exercise. Separate the words by commas. Do not use synonyms or near synonyms in one exercise. You can enter some notes for you and for your students. Both your students and you will be able to see the notes. You can write the title and the unit of the book or any other teaching aid you use for which you are going to create this exercise. Please use only English characters because our system is not ready to support special characters (Arabic, Chinese etc.)
Press the submit button to continue.
This is the creative part of this powerful tool. You need to write the exercise. I know what you are saying: I do not have time. I am a busy teacher. This is too difficult. This is really not much help for me. I can write my exercise on my type-writer and I need not go through all this ordeal. Well, I can reassure you. This service will surprise you. This service is feature packed and you will never regret you started using it. This part of the program is in fact the most creative and amusing part of your online endeavour.
So on this page there are the words you entered in the previous form. If the word is already in our dictionary, (at the moment of writing this help there are 1100 words in it) you can see the definition of the words and an example sentence for each word. If a word is not in our dictionary you are requested to add your own explanation (in English) and an example sentence. You can also add another explanation and example sentence to the word that is already in our dictionary if you need another meaning of the word because it is a homograph and you basically need another meaning or the explanation or example sentence is not appropriate to the knowledge or needs of your students.
If all of the words that you need are in the dictionary, you can add the exercise to the preferred class. If you edit this page by adding new words or meanings, your words with definitions and example sentences are sent to me. I check your changes and add the words to the dictionary. As soon as I add the words, you receive a mail to inform you that the words are now available. So please do not forget to enter your email address into the required field. In the email you receive you can see which words you requested. Now you can go through the process of creating a new exercise with the difference that now you will not add new definitions and example sentences. Press the submit button, choose the class to which you want to add the exercise. You are ready. From now on the new words and definitions will always be available to every teacher. You can use them again in any other exercise.
Was it difficult? I do not think so.
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Manage your exercises
Once you have created an exercise you can add it to other classes, print it in four formats. Try your hands on them to see what you get for your money. (I would like to remind you that this service is absolutely free and beats all fee-based services on the web.)
- scrambled
- put in the words
- complete the words
- mini crossword
(We are working on a real large crossword format and 'Find the words' game too.)
You can also copy any exercise to any class by just pressing one button. Great, isn't it?
Every time you create an exercise the students in that class are informed. So your students cannot make lousy excuses 'I did not know what to do at home', 'We did not have any homework'. Even if you do not make doing the exercises online compulsory in your class or for your private students, they will appreciate this service.
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Add exercises from NSE pool of exercises
This is a no pain job. This is a new function and I hope you will like it. Just click on the link to go to the latest exercises or you can go to http://www.nonstopenglish.com/allexercises to choose the Grammar or vocabulary item you want your students to practise. Click on the exercise button and then choose the class you want to add the exercise to and click on 'Add this exercise to this class' button. You are done. Later on you can also see how well the students from your class have done any particular exercise. The students are of course informed every time you add an exercise to any class. The students can also send you comments on any exercise.
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See your students' results
Once you have created an exercise for your students, they are available for them to do online. If they login to your class at www.nonstopenglish.com/vc/yourloginname/classname, they can do all the exercises online or they can print them. If they do it online, their results are saved to the server. You can see the following information.
- when the student did the exercise
- his/her score in %
- what format they used (scrambled, fill in the words, complete the words)
- how long it took them to do the exercise
- and detailed results broken down to words
I do not know if you need this functionality or not. The students themselves can see this statistics but of course they cannot see the right answers in the stats. (I might change this if I receive protests from you.)
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Conclusion
Well I am glad you have read so far. I hope this tool will be of use to you. I add new functionalities if they create added value (My motto is: the more is not less). Nonstop English preparing FLASH games. I am open to your comments. Please send me a mail (use the email address from the mail you receive when you register). Let me know what you think about this service. Let me know what functionalities you would like to have or find redundant. Let us know what students think about this service, what they find difficult and what they would like to improve.
Hope to hear from you.
Happy teaching!
Las Bujdoso
on behalf of
Nonstop English Team
Check-list
Compare our Virtual Classes with other services:
| Feature |
Nonstop English Virtual Classes |
Other services |
| Free teacher participation |
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| Free student participation |
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| Unlimited number of Virtual Classes per teacher |
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| Unlimited number of students per class |
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| Easy online class and student administration |
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| Detailed statistics of student activity down to each word |
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| To create an exercise you only insert the words |
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| You can copy an exercise you have created with the press of a button to another class |
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| You can generate printable exercises |
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| You can generate online exercises |
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| You can generate Flash exercises |
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| 5 exercise format is generated automatically (scrambled words, put in the words, complete the words, crossword, find the words) |
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| You can add grammar and vocabulary exercises from our fast growing pool of generic exercises with the press of a button |
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| Active teachers receive promotional T-shirt - free |
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