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| Newsletter #20 (October 2011) « Previous | Next » Better text-chatting function & Star teacher of the month |
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 Improved chatting function during your lessonsWe designed the ‘text-chat’ function during the lesson specifically to allow optimal language learning with minimal distraction. This is why you can close any single message box received from your teacher individually, and only keep the messages you want to continue talking about. We have been trialing a few different ways to improve this 'text-chat' or messaging function with a selection of students & lessons, and we now think it is ready to be open to all students and for all the lessons. What's the improvement? In addition to seeing messages received from your teacher in yellow boxes, you can now also see the message sent by you to your teachers in blue boxes. You can close them the same way by clicking the ‘x’ sign, or keep them to discuss longer sentences you sent to your teacher. Even though this was not intuitive, it became obvious during the pilot phase that being able to keep, and discuss about, the message sent to the teacher can be helpful and even vital in some cases, especially when there are mistakes in the sentence you sent, like using the wrong character or making a grammar error, which the teacher can then spend time to correct and/or explain the different usage. We look forward to hearing from you on how you like this new improvement.  Star Teacher of the Month: September 2011Teacher's name: Grace Category: Associate Teacher Reason to be Teacher of the Month: Grace hasn't been with us for very long and she has already established a loyal following. So we asked ourselves the question, how did she manage despite the competition from teachers who have been teaching on ChineseTeachers.com for much longer than her? The secret, we think, is a combination of her ability to adapt, willingness to try new things, open communication style with her students, as well as flexibility with lesson time requested by her students. On top of all that, being an Associate Teacher, the focus for her is to help student practice conversational Chinese, and improve student's oral capability. As Grace is one of the few teachers who can give a Chinese lesson with fluent Spanish as the instruction language, she plays a key role in making the students feel at ease, and allows the lessons to be fun, productive and efficient. So, for all the Spanish speakers out there who are still looking for the right teacher, Grace is the one for you! Shhh, what you might not know: Grace has a background in Design and has worked in both the Design industry and in Corporate Training. In addition to helping students here on ChineseTeachers.com, she is also a freelance designer. Happy Studying! The ChineseTeachers.com Team ChineseTeachers.com - Bringing native Mandarin teachers to everyone in the world  Want to receive free study materials? Subscribe to Practice-Chinese.com.  Want to know more about us? Read our progress since 2007 in our News page.  Want to unsubscribe? Simply reply 'stop' (you can opt-back-in later from your Profile page). |