Perfecting any skill can be a challenge!

In this episode, I talk with Margarita an outstanding member from my teacher´s club! She uses microlearning to help her students learn English and she has gotten excelent results with this way of teaching AND learning! Discover how you can optimize your free time and the advantages of asynchronous microlearning, tools that will improve your learning process!

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RESOURCES

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And hey, thanks for listening! 🎧💖

Today, we're going to be talking about something that you might

not have heard of about before.

We've got learning, and now we're going to talk about micro learning.

Here with me today is somebody who is in my accent teachers Academy and

she's been there for a while She's also a client because it's something

that she's working on for herself and she loves to be in our community

And she loves to share our knowledge.

So today we have Margarita who is talking to us about micro learning why

we need it Especially what exactly it is and then we're going to talk about the

subject of Asynchronous microlearning and how we can put those together.

She's going to share some stories about her own experiences and then we're going

to say, okay, what about the app Telegram?

How can we use that to apply microlearning and asynchronous learning?

So if you're a teacher and you're wondering about how to get started

with these ways of teaching, you're going to find today really valuable.

Woohoo, I'm super excited to finally get you on here to talk about

microlearning and telegram because it's like the only thing we've been talking

about recently in our teacher's club.

So welcome back.

It's not your first time.

I want to introduce Margarita.

Who I've known for a while and I see her all the time, but you guys

listening to this might not know her at all, unless you've listened to a

previous episode that featured her.

So I'm going to let Margarita introduce herself a little bit

again, and that way you'll get to know her and how we know each other.

So Margarita, go ahead and tell us a little bit about you.

Hi, guys.

My name is Margarita.

I'm an English teacher from Russia, and I use microlearning for my teaching, and

also go to Bianca's awesome club both for teachers and for accent training.

Yeah.

Yes, how long?

How long have we known each other?

About a year?

No?

Yeah, I think it's been exactly a year because I

joined your club last February.

Probably, yeah.

Yeah, I used to go to your office hours only.

And then maybe in July, I joined everything else.

And didn't regret it at all.

Totally recommend it.

Yeah, and I think one thing I love about having you there, too, there's

like a consistency, too that, anybody can show up at any time, and sometimes

we'll see you, and sometimes we'll see other teachers, and somebody's maybe

on vacation or traveling or something, and so it's nice because you're almost

always there, so there's a consistency there, too, that kind of helps the

community, which I really love.

So I want to say thanks for coming again to participate in this.

And yeah, really recently all the teachers in the club have been interested in

this idea of microlearning and getting to use Telegram more and the idea of

synchronous versus asynchronous classes.

So we were like, you know what, this would be a great time to put all

that together in a podcast and tell.

People, what we mean when we say that, because all of us are going to be

coming out with courses you included that include all of these things.

And so for whether it's for us, whether it's for accent training, whether it's

about baking bread any course you take could be about micro learning, learning.

Let me say that again, could be about micro learning.

So let's start with that.

What is micro learning?

Can you describe it for us?

Basically it's chopping up information into bite sized chunks.

So that you can learn for 20, 15 minutes a day, but on a regular basis

and there are studies which show that it's better for you in the long run.

Because okay, if you learn only once a week.

You can forget about English or baking or whatever you're learning between

those days and maybe the night before you might be like, Oh my God, what was there?

I have homework.

I don't remember anything, but if the last lesson was yesterday, you will have

an easier time recalling what it was.

And you can just start from where you finished earlier, and

it will be much easier on you.

So as so like that reminds me of when I was in school and high school

and I was taking like a French class and I think, our language classes weren't

very intensive, at least at my school.

So we had, I think, French once a week, or twice, or maybe three times a week.

But I remember the first like 15 minutes of each class was, do you

remember what we were doing last week?

Let's review last week, let's review the homework.

And you don't remember what you did, for that homework.

And I think as an adult as well, I try to batch a lot of things that I do.

And one of the things that I think is counterproductive in language

is if I try to smash everything together once a week, right?

It's not, it's almost, I guess it's almost like exercise in a way.

Wouldn't it be better to, yeah, to spread out and have more like regularity,

in that and repetition in that.

Yeah.

Cause I think things are changing and we're learning more about that.

So maybe tell us a little bit more about how you.

How do you see the structure of that, like how much per week?

I have a lot of students who want one hour per week, but

we cut that hour into 15 minute slots, so 15 minutes for four days.

We use maybe Monday to Thursday, or Tuesday to Friday, and we meet every day.

And then there is this part where I might give or not give homework.

Because Personally, as a student, I love a flipped classroom and I get annoyed

if I'm forced to show up and then do something I could have done on my own.

And I probably attract the same kind of people who are like, okay,

why why would we do that together?

I could have done it alone.

And I can give them little.

Tasks, maybe which would take 15 minutes to, so you get half an hour

of studying, if you have 15 minutes at home plus 15 minutes of a call

with me, if we're doing like the synchronous way, because as I will tell

you later, it can be asynchronous too.

And yeah it can work for some people for not for everyone a little disclaimer if

you can't force yourself to do something, sometimes it's better to have a call

tomorrow with your teacher and you're gonna feel bad if you don't do anything,

if you show up without doing anything, you might be ashamed and that can force you.

Into doing something, but for for others it's not an obstacle

and they work better this way.

And also like you can have a deadline.

Okay.

I have to do something before tomorrow because I need to send it to my teacher,

to my to the person who will check it.

And then I can get feedback during a call where I can get

that as a video or audio message.

So it's good work too.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Always.

Oh, yeah.

I want to point out what you said, which was, which is really important.

What you said, which is this is not a method that works for everybody.

There is no single method that works for everybody.

But for some people, this really hits home.

And it's exactly what they need, and I like what you mentioned too about Oh,

me as a teacher, I sometimes attract these students that kind of, that like

to learn in the same style that I like to learn and that I like to teach, and

I think that's also really important to remember too, because I think it's the

same thing with me, is you end up finding the people who are very similar to you

and have similar thoughts about learning and processes and things like that.

So absolutely, if this isn't for you good luck and have find the

person that works well with you.

But a lot of us are finding that this works for us, like you said,

you as a student of language.

And maybe when we talk more about asynchronous learning, we'll

talk about the Chinese class that you're taking as well and how that

kind of fits in on both sides.

Us, we are also learners, and we have to remember that we've been

in those shoes, and when we find something that works for us, it's

really nice to share that as well.

So we're finding a lot about this micro learning.

Could be like 10 15 minutes a day, maybe four times a, four

times that week, or three times.

Like you said, it depends on the person.

I have a question about that though.

When you have somebody who for let's say 15 minutes on Monday, Wednesday

and Friday or four or those five days per work week, let's say, do

you ever run into scheduling issues?

Like maybe it's cultural where, Oh God, I've got this 15 minute call.

Ah, but my meeting is running late.

And then they push maybe that call with you back, but you've got to

call with another client later.

Does scheduling become an issue because they're tiny chunks of time for you?

Yeah.

It happens, but it happens rarely.

I don't know, maybe it's a part of the personality type I attract or something

because usually we have like a certain time for a person, it is set in stone and

they protect that time slot, they protect this and they're like, no, like I have a

guy who has a senior managerial position and sometimes he just stops meetings.

With his workers and he's no, I have English now.

Let's continue in 15 minutes.

So unless his boss calls him, it's his private English time.

But overall I think there are no big issues.

And usually I set some time aside as my break and okay.

If there is someone who is like running late, but is determined to have a call.

Yeah, and I might push them to a later time or do it another day.

But if this person is disciplined, but has maybe internet connection issues,

because the person's traveling or has moved abroad and we have a big difference.

Because of the time zones we could totally do everything the

unsynchronous, asynchronous way, which has like on my part, I give the task.

And on the student's part there will be a written exercise, or maybe if

it's speaking but not a dialogue, a little monologue they can send me

an audio or make a video message.

It's very easy to do on Telegram, which I uses my main messenger.

Like they can send me a video and I can listen to that and I can correct

the mistakes and send my feedback like this so we don't have to actually meet

at the same time because okay, that person might have the time at 8 a.

m.

and I wake up at 10 and then I have the time to check the message like at 10 p.

m.

and that person is asleep already.

We wouldn't be able to connect.

But like this, using the modern technology, it's not an issue anymore.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah, that totally makes sense.

And it reminds me of a phrase that that we say a lot.

We say the first part of the phrase sometimes, but not always the second part.

And most people know the phrase, less is more.

Less is more, but they forget that the less has to be more, meaning

the quality has to be there, right?

And I think when you do these little chunks of things, excuse me, when

you do these little chunks of things, For me, that my, my lifetime with a

person or a group, it's sacred, right?

Like you said, you get annoyed if you show up and there's a task that you totally

could have done on your own, right?

Or you will, you can do on your own and you would do on your own.

And.

And then you show up and that's not the case.

For me, it's really important not to do those things because that time is sacred.

And then when you cut down the time, even though it's repeated,

to me, it's even more sacred.

So I totally get what you're saying about those kinds of things.

And was there something that you wanted to say about you let's talk now about a

flipped classroom and maybe quickly define it for people who don't know what that is.

And then something about, you had you had a story to tell about

somebody complaining about videos.

Yeah, basically a flipped classroom is when to avoid that

situation I mentioned before, you just give a video to watch at home

or an article to read at home.

And then the students comes prepared and you can discuss.

Or maybe you can do some exercises based on what has been read, what has been

watched, and it really saves the time.

And also the student doesn't have to sit with you, and you don't have to

silently wait for them to finish watching or finish reading, and at least in my

eyes, it's more effective, like this.

Yeah, you just let them prepare and then they can feel that every minute

they paid for is used effectively.

And I mentioned that on Instagram.

So in one of my stories and one of my students texted me that,

yeah, this is what happened with the last teacher before me.

And she said, okay, I paid a lot of money.

And then we sat together.

And then we watch something for 30 minutes or like out of an hour I paid for.

Why couldn't I have watched that YouTube video by myself?

Oh, I would be livid.

I would be livid.

Okay, I can see when watching a video together would be beneficial.

Let's say you're doing analysis, right?

Let's say it's you and I, and we're talking about accents, and we have

we, maybe we want to catch something.

This happens a lot in our feedback club, right?

Somebody William will bring a video that he just did, right?

Yeah.

And we could each watch it on our own and then each take notes and

then come back and compare notes.

But sometimes I think for us anyways, the way we structure things, when we watch

a little video live together, we've got everybody's input all at the same time,

but that's not what we're talking about.

We're talking about let's call it homework where Oh, here's the thing that

I want you to do on your own student.

Yeah.

Then do it, outside of class for one thing.

For one thing, like you said, this word effective keeps popping

up, so much more effective.

They might feel like they're wasting their time.

You also said it too.

You're sitting there waiting for somebody to finish an

article or something like that.

You might also get bored, as the teacher too.

It's both people are there.

And then the other thing that it made me think of is, let's say, let's go

back to the beginning where we said, ah, traditionally, you spend one big chunk

of time on language, but that's not how we use language generally, right?

We often switch.

Back and forth, throughout the week, throughout the day.

So this idea of switching back and forth for smaller chunks of

time is actually more authentic in how we use languages, too.

So I think that all of that goes together, like we said, to make your

learning, I think, a lot more effective.

And like we said, flipping the classroom is like a how should I say?

It's a No, it's a method that's been used there a lot.

And so we can now integrate these two things.

And like you said, it's not like we have to just make this commitment

and always do microlearning, but maybe somebody is traveling and they

only have this one chunk of time that week and you go back and forth.

And I think that flexibility that can exist there can be really

helpful, for a lot of people.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think if you do it asynchronously I would recommend like meeting, like

having a call from time to time.

And you might have an agreement that if there is a problem, your student

can request a call where you decide, oh, every week we have one call 15

minute call to discuss everything that learned where every two weeks or

every month you can check in depending on your students needs really.

And depending on what you're learning, how you're learning it, because like

we're talking about it in very broad terms, but actually we would need to

like check what the student needs right now and think about what can be done.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Let's expand on that too and maybe define synchronous versus

asynchronous learning, whether it's micro learning or, I don't know what

the other one would be, macro learning.

But let's quickly define when we say synchronous and asynchronous, what

does that look like to other people?

Can you give a little example maybe using your own experience as a learner?

Yeah.

I would say if we we're on a call right now.

We're doing it synchronously, so we could have an English lesson here, but if we

exchanged audio messages video messages and there would be like delays between our

back and forth that would be asynchronous.

Like it, it would've been an asynchronous con, an n asynchronous

conversation, or like we could have this our tasks sent from the teacher.

And then the replies, the attempts to do those tasks by the student.

And it works just as well.

Yeah.

And the thing that comes to mind too is like how I have things structured now

is that, as like I have clubs, right?

And we meet synchronously.

Everyone's there in person, right?

If somebody's not there because they're sick or they're traveling

or something like that, right?

Then they can watch the video replay, later.

But I'm not, in my case anyways, I don't assign like homework that somebody has

to do or pre work, like you were saying too, the flip flipping of the classroom.

It's because why?

Because for me, what I have are clubs and not what I would call classes.

And then the other thing is I think we're both going to also talk about

too, is the an idea of a course now, or maybe perhaps a challenge where people

are doing more kind of on their own and maybe just checking in once in a while.

I think that's what you mean, right?

More of a format like that.

Yeah,

Yeah, I would say so, but in my case, it's very tailor made because

I'm always asking like what do you do for work and what do you need English for?

And it turns out that That all students are different and they

they might have different needs.

So I have a textbook I use like a couple of textbooks I like and I might

offer, would you like just a general course a general course of English

because you have B1, we need B2.

And we just work on everything like using those tasks, but more often than

not they have very specific needs and we start reading different kinds of

technical guides or medical documentation or something like something from the

work they need right now, or we work on specific situations from their life.

And so I adapted to that.

And it's actually very interesting, but hard to do because you basically

design tasks for that person depending on their mood what they're

doing, where they're at and so on.

And you make the tasks and then you send them to them, or if you do the

synchronous way of learning, it's like asking what would you like to do?

What's the priority for this week?

And we work together.

Actually I would say that I like to collaborate with my students and I think

maybe It's a feature which attracted me to your clubs because you don't force me.

You don't make me read some text that you chose.

You're like, okay, you can bring whatever you want and then you can choose the

priority we are going to work on.

Then you give me feedback focusing on that thing.

And this is what I like to do too, because I've worked with adults and

they have specific needs and I don't want to take all it's not about

responsibility, but I don't want to take 100 percent of the responsibility

for their results because maybe they have their own ideas, maybe they know.

from their previous experience, how it was with their other teachers, what they would

like to avoid, what they would like to do.

And we decide together and I think it gives the best results when

you have some say in your face.

Yeah, and some people are not like you said some people are not

used to that and they've been held by the hand their whole life in terms of

learning and education and they, maybe they want some say, but maybe they

don't even know that's a possibility.

So giving them a way to just at least think about that and say, hey,

what are your priorities, right?

Maybe nobody's ever even asked them that question, and it's a little difficult,

at first but getting somebody to the point where they can say what's important

to them, it sounds like maybe a little thing, but it's actually a really big

thing in some places, in some cultures, in some educational styles, is we say

it like, oh, it's no big deal, but for some people it's a really big deal, and

they've never even thought about it.

So getting on to that might take a little bit of effort.

Like you said, It's not easy.

None of this stuff is meant to be necessarily easier, but it's meant

to give more how should we say?

It's supposed to give you more bang for your buck, basically, right?

So the idea is by spreading this out, you get a more realistic

approach back and forth.

Like you said, too, you're totally right.

I didn't really hit on this.

I was thinking in very general terms, like these courses that you might buy on some

of these big platforms that sell DIY video courses, they're asynchronous, right?

And you might or might not get any feedback with them.

But what you're saying is, look at how personalized it can be, right?

When you're, I was thinking along the line of a course with a small group,

but you're saying that you do this even with your one on one students, right?

You're doing this asynchronous micro learning that is tailored

to each individual student, right?

Which doesn't take you any less time, that's for sure, but it's way more

meaningful, to, to the people involved.

And to you too, I think you get a lot of satisfaction out of that.

And when you find something you often bring something and

say, Oh, I found this article.

that I'm using with my students now.

And I'd also like this, like to use this for myself to read out louder.

Hey guys, I'm reading this book and I think you'd find it interesting too.

And I think doing that makes it more meaningful for everybody, so yeah,

I really, I'm really getting on the asynchronous track right now too.

And I think something I like about it.

Is the timing as well, maybe you can talk about your Mandarin

class now about how like how that's fitting into your life now.

Yeah, basically I have just transitioned from one school and their

way of teaching into another one which has an asynchronous course I'm taking now.

Yeah, I went from a more traditional way when I had two 60 minute classes

per week and we would revise for maybe half an hour and we would play a game.

So basically there's a group.

Of students on zoom watching the teacher play a game like we can choose a number

and then she opens a card and we need to translate and I get the card, but

I could have done it myself because I could just use a quizlet and yeah.

Or KY or I could have come.

Yeah.

Or yeah.

Or KY or, I don't know, like paper cards, whatever.

Yeah, I could, I, I could have done it on my own, but then I could

have come half an hour later and started with the new material.

On the one hand I get where they're coming from and if a student does nothing and

wants to do nothing maybe it's a good way.

Of doing it, but I didn't see why I needed to sit there and

we also watched videos in there.

It was funny because it was a bit outdated.

It was about Harry Potter 3 premiere.

And it it was made in 2004 and two of my group mates are younger than that.

So I remember that time, but they don't.

And the characters in the video used a landline phone and a dial up

internet to call their to see when the premiere wasn't to call their friends.

And then they tried to meet up and I was like, okay, could you

have maybe chosen anything new?

Because I tried to use the latest materials with my students.

As as you mentioned, I take articles which are like two days old.

And then we have this old school thing.

It's not it's not like nobody uses Mandarin since 2004.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's no new materials out there to use.

Oh, Mandarin's a dead language like Latin.

Not exactly.

Like it should be easy enough to update those things.

It reminds me of like school, right?

When I was in high school.

And first of all, you're in the building all day.

It's like teenage jail.

And you're there and you're forced to be there.

Yeah.

And at that time teachers were trying to do their best and they were trying

to make things fun and maybe show videos and things like that to this

kind of captive audience that didn't really want to be there anyways.

And so that was tough.

But now, not only are you and I, we're adults and we're teaching in this kind of

new age, but also our students are adults.

I don't know about you, I don't really take anybody who's not an adult, partly

because of that too, partly to make it more personalized and to bring people

up to speed with these things, because I think a lot of education, at least in

my day and age, was like a bit traumatic and like learning wasn't fun, and now

learning should be about What we want to learn and what I want to learn and

what I want to get out of those things.

So it sounds like doing this and chopping it up makes it more

meaningful, makes it more memorable.

And now what are you, what's your new Mandarin class like

and how's that different?

Oh it's asynchronous.

I get short videos with some grammar and I'm taking a phonetics course too.

So there's some pronunciation tips.

And then I just watch the video and they have the tasks and you need to

repeat while watching, like a bit of shadowing, and then you get a task in a

special telegram channel for this course.

And you can record yourself and send your recording to the

teacher's DMs, also on Telegram.

Very easy for me because I use this messenger all the time.

So I have my friends, my like students there, and then I just switch in

there and just listen to something.

On the school's telegram, and then I record myself and send it to my teacher.

And then I get feedback as an audio or as a video, maybe something a little text.

Saying, oh it's great, but you could work on like this.

Yeah.

And in general, I think that's the way for me from the teacher's side, it

could be tricky because as we mentioned before, I tend to make everything

tailor made and oh, this person likes this singer and there's news about

that, or, oh, this person works in this sphere and there's this event in the

industry, oh I need to discuss that.

So it would take me more time to, to do that.

And also, I think from the teacher's point of view, you need

to limit the amount of feedback you give because you can overdo it.

I can't continue answering for a long time.

So that's the tricky part, but I think it's manageable.

Yeah, that's a really good point about.

So what I'm envisioning now is how you're describing this is like proximity.

I'm thinking about one on one is very close, right?

You have a very deep relationship with those one on one students.

And then you've got small groups, right?

Not to say that it's any less deep, but it's also divided.

a little bit, right?

Because you're seeing everybody.

And then you've got these things where it's more of a course or a challenge

or sprint, some people call it, right?

Where you don't have as much, let's say contact with them,

at least personally, right?

But I feel, it feels like, In this way, even asynchronously, you can

get a deeper feeling of contact with people because even if you have a

large group, if you're sending personal feedback to somebody, even if you're

not together there at the same exact time, then you still feel connected.

I think to that person.

So here's another aspect.

I think that asynchronous and microlearning can keep us into

contact or give us a better feeling of contact with our teachers, even if

it's not a one on one class, right?

Most people want to do that one on one class because they want that contact.

They want that closeness.

But I think now we're saying we can feel just as close with a group

of people, and just be careful.

Maybe if you're a teacher, Yeah.

doing this, be careful of maybe your boundaries, your focus, your attention,

and maybe don't let yourself overdo it.

Cause I think we can all easily go overboard.

But you just mentioned like our third big topic, which we're talking

about, and it might sound silly, but I do want you to define telegram.

I know that sounds silly, but think about people in the U S who

barely even use WhatsApp sometimes.

So some of them know what's up.

A lot of them don't even know Telegram.

So can we maybe start with the differences of both?

A telegram is a popular messenger is the most

popular messenger in Russia.

It has some of the WhatsApp functions.

I would say It was it has all of the WhatsApp functions plus more.

And there is a premium version you could buy, but it's mostly free.

So most of most of the features are free and you can just download it and give it

to the access to your contacts and you will have everyone, who has Telegram too.

And usually for me, that's a lot of people instantly and it is used by everyone.

So I have chats with my friends.

If I take any kind of a course there is a chat for that.

I have chats what's happening in my city dance chats the Hermitage

Museum it's kinda like our Louvre has its own Telegram channel too.

So I follow and find out all the news.

So it's yeah, news channels lots of other things in there.

So yeah, probably your chat with the neighbors like in

your building is there too.

Or some whose cat is this?

Have you seen my cat?

And they will find each other.

Lots and lots of things and can be used for learning too.

So not only for keeping it in touch with your friends and some big

companies have a telegram bots.

Which answer your question.

So you depending on how you program it, it can be useful too.

I haven't tried it for myself, but I know that some people actually

make them for selling stuff.

If you buy something, you can get the instant access to a Telegram bot.

And then you can just choose the options and get get stuff done.

Oh, actually I have taken, I wouldn't say it's it was a real course a

little mini or micro course by a girl who actually teaches teachers.

So like she helps them make their own products.

So she had this magical packaging for it.

She was like, okay, do you want to do some magic?

You can buy my webinar.

Like this.

And I paid for it and I got into her bot and I had to tap some buttons.

And then there was like a little magical experience she used some

like emoji stickers to look at, to make it look more magical.

And she had a YouTube video in there so you don't have to

leave Telegram to watch it.

And then there was some like magical features after that.

You could get some extra files, you could get some extra stuff.

It's a bit more advanced even for me, I just do everything manually for now.

But yeah, I could be used to

in the future.

Yeah.

And that's the reason that I wanted to quickly review what this is, because,

believe it or not, there's a lot of people that would be listening to this.

They're like, tell a what, tell a who, and maybe they know WhatsApp as a messenger,

a service, but Telegram is so much more.

And I, one thing I like to do is to introduce kind of people to

things that are incredibly useful.

They might not know about, for example oh, we talk about discord, right?

A lot of people don't know discord.

One thing it's so wonderful about, one thing that's so wonderful about discord is

it's like a mishmash of different things and it's the same is true of telegram.

I feel like you said, anybody can use it.

It can be where's my cat?

There's suspicious activity in my neighborhood there.

It can be all the way to big corporations, right?

It can be very personal.

It can be very generic.

It can be it's all these things and it's got.

So many things built into it.

You don't necessarily need to pay for the premium version.

Of course, the premium version is even better.

But there's whole areas of the world that are using this thing that I think people

listening to this might not even know.

It's huge in India.

Like you said, it's huge in Russia.

I'm looking at the statistics now.

Indonesia, United States.

But when I think of the United States, I think it's a lot of people

who travel internationally, right?

People who already have a lot of experience with these things, who

may or may not be listening to this.

Brazil, Egypt, I'm looking at this, Vietnam, Mexico.

There's tons, there's millions and millions of people that are using this

app that a lot of people don't even know.

And one way that we can use it, besides all that other stuff,

is like you said, courses.

Maybe mini courses, maybe micro courses.

Can you tell us a little bit about how, How you've experienced a course

there or how maybe you're going to use it for yourself because this is

something that we in my teachers club I've been talking about a lot and

okay, how am I going to structure it?

What am I going to do here?

And a lot of kind of questions are coming up on the creator

side on our side of this.

But maybe start with any experience that you've had as a learner using a

course, getting a course on Telegram.

Yeah, absolutely.

About my Mandarin class they have a channel and a chat.

Basically these are the two forms of I don't know how to call it, like two

things you could create on Telegram.

Yeah.

You could have

how it's maybe the organizational structure, right?

We've got channels, which are for broadcasting basically.

And then the chatting, I like to think of it as the other side

of the coin is the chatting.

Part is for people who want to maybe have a discussion about

what's in the broadcast channel.

Is that how

you think of it?

Yeah.

Yeah, I would say so because you can have one or both.

Most of big channels, have chats too.

So a channel is basically your blog.

You can post anything like videos of yourself and now since this

year you can post stories too it's it's Instagram, but with more text.

Because it's more text based and people write a lot in there.

You can make polls you can ask your subscribers to choose something

and you can go live and just tell them about your day and so on.

And yeah, in the chat you can have a discussion or as a subscriber you can

come and talk about what you've learned.

So basically, as per the Mandarin course I go to the channel.

I watch a video, and then I have audio and little tasks I need to do.

And then I make a recording and I send the recording to my teacher, into the DMs.

But there is a chat for everyone who's taking the course,

and I could write there too.

Introducing myself, maybe there is something interesting about

Mandarin, or some joke, some funny video, I could throw it in there.

And sometimes course creators encourage you to to talk about What's going

on, maybe discuss some topic and I've taken a course for teachers

and they encouraged chatting with each other and we had weekly recaps.

Little reports about, Oh, what's happened in your life?

Would you like to share any achievements?

And it was very cool.

And if and we still talk even after that course we're still in touch.

And if someone has a question, it's swiftly answered.

And it's funny too, because, Oh, I have a student, I don't have the time who

would like to take like this person or.

Okay, my student has a daughter.

I don't work with kids.

Who would like to take this kid happened to me or oh guys Do you have any tips?

What's the best?

Business English textbook we needed ASAP something like this or what's

the best channel or could you?

give some channels on YouTube for wine tasters And I have a list and I

come out and I'm like, here you go.

I throw it at them.

That's funny.

So it's it's a lot of, it sounds you take a course, you are in a

group, and it sounds like you end up getting a lot of networking done.

And you maybe, I know you've mentioned before, like years later you'll

think, Oh yeah, I took a telegram course with this guy and now I have

something that I wanted to tell him.

And you've got that contact there that you do end up reusing quite a lot more.

Whereas.

On the other side of things, I've taken courses like online, right?

And you sign into their website, and you, maybe you post a question, and who

knows if it's going to get answered?

Who knows how often they check it?

And there's no sense of community.

People try, right?

It's, they try.

But it's just, it's so removed because you got to go to this app to do the thing,

and you got to sign into this thing.

And it's very insular.

Whereas, if I'm already using Telegram for everything else anyways, and

if I'm not, I probably should be.

Then boom, everything is already there.

And I'm just like always a bit able to grow those connections, and get

the feedback and maybe like you said, make new friends and things like that.

And I think you even have some, you've mentioned for like your

dance classes and things like that.

So it's probably a great way to make friends as well, because

you have shared interests.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

So today I had a lesson with a student whom I actually

met through my dance class.

Yeah, she became my student and she brought two friends.

So who also became my students and yeah, it's nice.

And it really works.

And as for networking, like professionally, it also helps.

I told you about a course for teachers and then I wrote about my achievements

and one of them was like mastering notion.

And then they remembered me as that Notion girl.

And when someone else was making a course she reached out to me and

she was like, okay I need someone to give a guest lecture about Notion.

And I did, it was like a little business opportunity for collaboration.

Totally.

Speaking of guest lectures, yeah, very often, not just Notion, but one thing I

love is to create community and putting people in touch with one another.

And I think I've only just scratched the surface with Telegram and this is going

to be a really big part of 2024 and after for me and all the teachers in our club,

because you've been so kind in sharing your knowledge even previously about

Notion, but now also about Telegram.

So just to say if anybody else is out there and thinking like, Oh, here's a

whole world that I know nothing about.

And I wish somebody could be, with me and show me and answer

my questions about these things.

Maybe this is something that you want to get into too.

So you can join our teacher's club and also say that Margarita

is not just the notion girl.

She's the everything girl.

She does telegram.

She always tells us about the books that she's reading.

And you're just, I want to go back to the idea of community again, that.

Everybody in our group has so much to offer and it's such a, it's

such a wonderful place to meet people in person synchronously.

And we always, we can always we know each other are available on

offline, let's say asynchronously and we support each other too.

And you're saying too, that there's this whole thing on Telegram as well

that most of us don't take advantage of.

So again, I'm just beginning to scratch the surface of Telegram.

I know that there's so much functionality there and things that I don't know.

I'm learning bit by bit.

And then we got both inspired.

I think we had this spiraling effect for each other of motivation.

I think it was last week we happened to be, I think it was an office

hours and we got on the subject of swear words in different cultures

and different languages and how we use swear words and things like that.

And then that made me think, you know what, that's going to be the

first telegram course that I create, I'm going to create a course on how

to pronounce and use swear words.

Effectively in English and correctly in English, because like when

you're hot and you want to say this thing in this way, like it just

undermines you when you don't right.

So I want to give people I want to empower people to be

able to use swear words better.

And so I thought, you know what, that's going to be my first telegram course.

So that's what we're working on.

Tell us a little bit more about it.

Your course that you want to work on, how we can find out about that.

And you also mentioned there's something else that we didn't really talk about

is how to do feedback within a course.

So maybe tell us what you're thinking about that.

So you inspired me to make a little like telegram one on one

course one on one course for teachers, because I thought, oh everyone

knows that it's not useful knowledge It's not something to talk about.

And then you had questions and I'm like, okay, maybe I will make a

little course, like how to start.

And yeah, as soon as I finish, I will tell you.

So probably by the time the podcast airs, I will have finished.

Fingers crossed.

I'll try.

Yeah.

You were thinking like, Oh yeah, this is all like everybody knows this.

This is like one on one stuff.

Most of us don't know the one on one stuff.

And every time you mention a little thing, I think.

Even when we say, Oh, look.

There's a video, but guess what?

You can press that little A and then it transcribes a video for you.

Blows our minds.

Like every time there's these little tips that you think are intuitive,

we don't even know these things.

So yeah, you creating a telegram course on how to teach on telegram

is perfectly what everybody needs.

Yes, exactly.

So yeah, tell us more about that.

Yeah, so I think I will just make some tips on how to start and

like about the functions and what I've seen as a learner, what what works more

effectively what doesn't, maybe some options because it's really a whole world.

And there are a lot of ways of using this app and there are a

lot of like teachers communities you might want to reach out to.

Maybe I will share a couple.

With teachers from other countries who might join those communities, too, and

you can find someone to collaborate with and to cross promote each other or find

advertising opportunities because there is A whole set of rules of how that works.

It doesn't work exactly as WhatsApp or Instagram and anything else really.

But I think it's useful and free or if we're talking about the premium

rather cheap instruments you could use.

Yeah, considering all the things, if you're a teacher anyways, and you're

paying money for subscriptions, like, all, I don't know, the subscriptions pile up,

and Telegram is pretty cheap, it's super cheap actually, for I think what you get

out of that, I've already got the premium, and the reason, the one big reason is When

I'm joining these groups of international people, like we said, like a lot of the

rest of the world uses telegram, so it could be in many different languages.

The feature that I like most on the premium is it's got instant translation

for all the messages and I find that oh.

Here's access to a whole bunch of people that I would never, I would not

even know what they're talking about.

And here I can follow along.

I can get ideas on style and things like that.

And you're, you just get this insider view that you just otherwise couldn't write.

And you'd be just cut off from that too.

So I've already got a telegram channel.

You've got a telegram channel.

We're going to put, we're going to put both of those clearly in the show

notes and we want people to join them.

I think yours is free and open to the public, right?

Yeah, it is.

Huh, yeah, mine, yeah, mine is too.

And then there's some, there might be some other ones, because we didn't

mention this, but you can have a public or a private channel too, so

I imagine when you're talking about some of these courses, you get a

special link, and that's how you

Yeah, of course.

So you don't you don't want just anyone to join, but sometimes it's

funny because there are like chats of like Russian teachers like

Russian is a foreign language.

And there, there's always some Arabic guy who's like girls

who will teach me for free.

I'd like to learn Russian or

Yeah, I'm sure that kind of that kind of experience is fairly common.

I know on discord, I get I get marriage proposals.

I get cryptocurrency proposals like all the time.

It's just like par for the course for some of these on Instagram too.

Yeah, you get a lot of that stuff too.

So I think it's unavoidable, but yeah.

Yeah.

But okay.

Speaking about the premium feature as of now, they have this option.

You can let only premium owners text you.

Probably it would defeat the purpose of meeting a lot of new people, but if you're

done with this you could just like switch switch it on and also I would recommend

the mute button because if you're talking about teaching asynchronously.

And your student potentially sending you stuff at 2 a.

m.

If you mute them, you're gonna, you're gonna sleep through it,

it's gonna be fine for you.

But if you don't, you might

wake up.

You don't get notifications.

Yeah, that's I think important on the teacher side and the creator side

of those things about boundaries and yeah, not overdoing it and things like

that, because I can see how you could easily slip into just spending way too

much time on this thing, because now you're spreading it out, rather than

dedicating, a certain amount of time.

But again, To come back full circle.

It depends on the person.

It depends on the teacher depends on the student.

What's right for you.

I have the same experience.

So I just joined a new telegram group for this technology

thing training that I'm doing.

And my God, there's like Easily 300 messages a day.

If I did not mute that, like I would just ding ding.

I'd be getting pinged all the time.

So yeah, important to mute your channels, too.

And like you have over 500 channels that you're a part of.

You can't possibly be paying attention to those things.

So you have to be selective, I imagine, about that.

Yeah, absolutely.

So for today, I think we were, we want to talk about microlearning.

Check.

We wanted to talk about Asynchronous learning and microlearning and how we're

using Telegram now for microlearning.

Is there anything else that you wanted to say about Telegram for microlearning or

anything about a synchronism or flipped classrooms or benefits to microlearning?

Is there anything else that you wanted to mention?

So I wanted to mention another function on Telegram because

we discussed the mute button, but also you can use delayed messages.

So maybe like it's the other side of that coin.

So maybe it's not your student doing stuff at 2 a.

m.,

maybe it's you.

And you don't want to wake to wake the student up.

Maybe they don't know how to use the mute button, so you don't want to risk it.

And so you can just choose the time and the date when this message is going to

go to your students and potentially, so if you have a course, which is

not like a tailor made as I described earlier, but something you want to give

to your students, like everything you want to send them, you could just set

it up once and then it will just be sent on certain dates at certain times.

And you might prepare like videos or texts, what to do, and just

program it once and forget about it.

It will be sent later.

And I think it's very useful.

Instead of giving one task.

So as we said comparing one hour a week and okay, here's what we've done

and here's your homework for the week.

You can give tasks like every day.

And you can program them to to be sent every day once.

So maybe you do it for the whole week and then the student knows that

okay like the tasks come out at 9 a.

m.

Every day.

Yes.

And yeah, but yeah, they could use the CNET and you don't have

to think about, Oh, did I send it?

Did I not?

That's gold right there.

That's like a little extra golden nugget.

A tip that you've given us is that, yeah, being able to schedule

things to release in the future.

Fantastic, because sometimes I get I get like super focused, and

I'll do a whole bunch of things at once, and then, but I can't just

post all of that at once, right?

That's like a bombardment.

So I have to remember, okay, this one, then this one tomorrow, then this one

tomorrow, and keep the conversation going.

And as we said, too, like people like check things, it's a form

of social media too, in a way.

And that, and people get used to going and seeing, Hey, what's new?

What's new with Margarita?

What's new with Bianca?

And seeing that's there and not just like a, an onslaught of things and then

nothing and then going dark, for a while.

So yeah, using that scheduling button is really key.

And there's so many tricks too, that you've been sharing

with us in our teacher's club.

So if people want to be a part of that.

You can join our club our accent teachers academy and learn about

some of these things and actually, like we said, the things that people

want to learn about, that's what we talk about right if somebody

recently wanted to start a newsletter.

So we were talking about newsletters for a while and then sometimes it's

videos and Filters and things like that.

Like you just said today, Oh, look, zoom has a way you can add a beard

if you want, or something like that.

And so we're always sharing those little tips on based on what's interesting to us.

We don't follow a set course that somebody may or may not be interested in.

And then also if somebody wants to learn more about Telegram, you're

going to be having this course come out Telegram one on one course for teachers.

And we're going to put, we're going to put that all the links down in

the show notes below, but as for now.

You said people can just DM you to get on the waiting list.

Huh.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah, we will put like my socials into the description.

You can contact me on Instagram or my Telegram.

So Feel free to message me.

You might inspire me to add something new into my course.

Totally.

We feed off of each other all the time.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so what we wanted to say in general is I think you wanted to say

to really check out microlearning because it might change your life.

That's what you said.

Yeah.

Yeah,

absolutely.

It really might change your life because you might as a student, you might use the

time you couldn't use for learning because of like the time difference or maybe

you just have a little chunks of time.

So the lessons are one hour and you only have 15 minutes.

It wouldn't work like that like synchronously, but for asynchronous

learning or for a short call, like 15 minutes it could be

perfect and it would work and it would help you reach your goals.

Somehow, because in the perfect world, of course, we would have enough time

to learn everything we want, but unfortunately it's not like that.

We have to prioritize and try to find the time for things we really want to learn.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think, yeah.

Time is, I'm surprised we didn't mention this earlier.

What's the main complaint that most of us have about our language learning or

whatever it is like, Oh, I have no time.

And this is a way to find the time and make the time because then you

only have to find little chunks of time rather than a whole hour, and

then that's just one of the benefits I think that we talked about today.

So as usual, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and

thank you for being a real rock.

in our community.

We just love having you there.

So thanks again.

Oh,

thank you.

Thank you for having me.

And thanks for your lovely community.

It's one of the highlights of my last year that I found you.

And it's very beneficial for me both as a student, as a teacher too.

Oh,

that's so kind.

Oh and I'm sure it's not the last podcast episode we'll do together.

So we'll just say bye for now.

Yeah.

Bye for now.

Thank you.

See you soon.

Bye guys.

Bye bye.

So thanks again for joining us today.

Thanks again Margarita for coming today to share your knowledge with us and

thank you guys for listening in today.

Like we said, check out microlearning, it might just change your life.