There are a number of sly things you can do to really improve your teaching and your relationship with your students.
I remember EVERYTHING about you
Something that makes a huge impression is if you make a note in the student's profile whenever they share anything (within reason) with you (kids' names, travel experiences etc.). Months down the track when you ask them "How is little [insert name of child here]?", it will blow their mind.
Never give the secret away, since they will then be suspicious of anything you even genuinely recall about them.
NB: Make sure when you read a student's profile that, if you refer to some detail, they actually told you and not some other teacher. We don't want to give them impression that we are gossiping about them or worse — keeping some creepy dossier about every detail of their private lives. One way to avoid this is to initial the details you get and add a date: ex. "Favourite movie is Casablanca (MR 15/4/2016)."
Ninja Google
You are sitting in front of the internet, so use it. When people ask you about stuff, Googling "Define X" or "What is the difference between X and Y?" etc. can get you the answer pretty quick. You need to be good at concealing the fact that you are asking the internet. Delay and distract, all the while searching and looking for the answer. You can also defer till after the class ("That's a good question. I am not sure. I'll let you know later, but let' stay focussed on the lesson for now") and copy/paste the question and answer into the lesson record.
Get off Facebook, Twitter, email etc.
Make sure you are otherwise distraction free. People can always tell.
Watch the birdie
One way to avoid appearing distracted, even when you are not is look into the camera, not at them on the screen.
This is me looking at the Skype window, in a vaguely severe manner, as is my way:
This is me looking down the barrel of the camera with my best what-an-interesting-anecdote! face on.
Multi-media lesson records
Share Youtube videos (for example, about pronunciation), links (to good resources you know) and images (but not pictures of cats please!) in your lesson records if you think they will be useful. Always record personalised audio too!
Which is more natural? Use an Ngram
First of all, this question is misformed. If you get it, point out that things are natural or they are not. What the question really is is "Which is more common?" I used to hate being asked that, and then there was Google's Ngram Viewer. If you don't know it, you should! It will search lots of books and tell you the relative frequency of things. You can do lots of interesting comparisons with it, and give a pretty solid answer to questions of frequency. Note that you can restrict the search to different groups of books (ex. American English or British English). If you use the embed media button, you can paste the embed code in there and it will show up, like this:
So step by step:
- generate your ngram, and then copy the embed code (note the URL);
- click the "embed media" button on the lesson record tool bar; and
- paste in the code you got for the ngram.
You will then see a big box in the lesson record with "iFrame" written in red. After you save the lesson record, you should see the ngram.
If you see just the code, then you did not paste the embed code into the "embed media" box. If you see a broken picture icon, you used the "insert picture" button by accident.
You can also add wildcards, search for parts of speech and other nifty things. Details are on the Google Ngram site. That means you can also do the following:
Wildcard search
Using "*" will allow you to search for anything that might complete a phrase. For example, searching for "try to *" (no quotes) will give you this:
Inflections
To search for different inflections of a word, use "_INF". For example "look_INF for answers" will give you this:
Parts of speech
There are parts of speech tags you can use to improve your search too. You can figure out what part of speech of a word is more common, using something like "look_NOUN, look_VERB" (no quotes):
There are lots of ways to combine these kinds of searches to create some interesting insights. Something like this "((Bigfoot + Sasquatch) - (Loch Ness monster + Nessie))" will tell you that people are talking a lot more about Bigfoot now than they are about Nessie:
Or that football isn't as popular as it once was versus a basket of other sports, using "((Football:eng_2012 + Soccer) - (Football:eng_us_2012 + Baseball + NFL + Basketball))", which filters for the Br.E. usage of "football" versus the Am.E. usage: