Hello everyone, welcome to a brand new episode of ESL Talk. I'm your host Faye. And I'm Daniel, and welcome to this week's episode. where we're going to be talking about how to make classes engaging and fun. for young learners yeah great we're very excited to dive into this topic i am at least because i'm not the expert here
But we're going to have Daniel sharing his experience. And we're also going to have a guest, our special guest, Yan Wang. She's the co-founder and CEO of Fun Class, which is a special news. service, an app for people teaching young learners and I'm very excited to learn more about it. It's going to be great. Yeah. And Daniel, I'm actually looking forward to hearing your experience. So you have more experience with young learners.
We're talking about being engaging and fun. How do you find that that is different? from teaching adults i think the biggest difference that i found so i taught elementary school for two years and i realized wow you need a lot of energy so i think The energy level is very, very different. And, you know, I know you don't teach young children, Fei, but I know you have young children and it's very energy sapping. It's very draining mentally and can be also a lot.
Yes. To think about. So I would probably say that you have to have a lot of energy. You have to be able to adapt things. You have to be able to have lots of things to keep. the students busy so the principle i always had is like keeping their hands busy if their hands are busy then they can't be doing things they shouldn't be doing so it was a lot of um physical activity a lot of tpr so singing dancing writing acting all those little things and
You know, you can do that to some extent with adults, but I don't think adults love to sing songs and do nursery rhymes. I mean, some of them might, but not in my experience. So I think the biggest difference is kind of how you plan a class, more activities, making it as engaging as possible.
And trying to make it a little bit more physical as well. The goals probably don't need to be as focused as they would be in an adult class. You know, it's more about getting them to... be familiar with something or get to grips with something or start to use something so i think those are a lot of differences um again yeah you know it's
It's really difficult teaching children when you start out because you feel like, oh, I've planned all these great activities and I've planned all these great games and it's going to be amazing. And it doesn't always go that way.
Keeping them engaged, keeping them motivated, keeping them switched on is great. And in our interview today with Jan, we'll learn a little bit about Fun Class, which kind of aims to do some of those things and should hopefully... Yeah, because I feel like you... you need to have a lot of tools in your toolbox right like we all do for adults as well but i feel like the impression i have is that with
teaching young learners you almost have to have more because you just gotta have more backup more backup more backup and i guess over time you kind of learn which activities are kind of true and tested and that will work for most cases um but how then in your opinion Could all those skills you have, all those tools you have, how could they transfer to an online environment? Do they transfer? Do you find that there's some things that you can do better or worse?
Yeah, I have taught young learners online as well. And I find that it needs to be, you know, it's the same kind of principle as an adult lesson or an older learner. You need to have an interesting hook. You need to have a way to get them interested in the lesson and, you know.
trying to make it as engaging and interesting as possible. So asking them questions, what is this? What do you think this might be? What does this mean? What does this look like? What color is this? So you're just tweaking the questioning. and then during the lesson as well you shouldn't do any one skill for more than maybe five or six minutes at a time so you know for example
I've made the mistake too of writing things, you know, we're writing the letters of the alphabet or we're practicing the shapes or whatever it is. More than five minutes, you know, young learners tend to lose focus and lose attention. um so switch it up okay we're gonna do abc okay now we've done abc let's do some reading or let's do let's talk about this so let's watch this video or listen to this song
and then you can go into the next plot. So breaking things up is really nice as well. I think that's key. And then also during the class, lots of feedback, lots of opportunities to practice, for them to make mistakes, for them to get feedback. I think those are really important as well. And then having a reward built into it. So if it's a game, if it's something, you know, I usually always have a game waiting and I say, okay.
10 minutes more and then we have a game. We can do this game or that game. You can have a choice. You can choose the game you want to play. That worked really well for me. And then the homework generally was kind of half fun and half like... So it would be like, you know, if you're doing the letters, okay, we're doing the letters to spell these words or, you know, something that you're interested in or you tell me.
you know, a movie that you love. Okay, we're going to do your favorite superhero. I'm going to write some sentences. So those are the ways that you have to tweak it and tailor it. The same as any class, you know, you need to have a goal and you need to be. be able to meet the needs of the learner it's just something that's done a little bit
a little bit more of a relaxed way and not as focused away. But again, as long as they're showing those skills and demonstrating them, that can be really, really helpful. So online, using the right tools, which we'll talk about, getting them engaged and also... going like not being scared to go back to certain things and having the ability okay let's go back let's look at it again let's check it again
And sometimes taking a break, like students ask me, what is this? And I'll just pause for a second. I'll say, let's take a look together. Look at a picture of this. Here's what it is. Here's what it looks like. So those are some techniques that have worked well for me also. Yeah. Now what about the physical component of interactivity? Like, cause when you have.
on face-to-face classes it's easier i guess to like give the students the marker to go up to the board or don't have them like work together and draw on the piece of paper together and stuff like that do you know of any tools um that do that have you used anything that was successful because i tried using even like the zoom tools with my adult students and so glitchy and like yes a lot of learning so
In an academic setting, I've used Teams, which doesn't really have that much functionality for young classes. When it comes to Zoom, like you mentioned, it's not the best. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. teaching the learners how to find those tools and how to navigate them can be really tricky. So there isn't really anything that I feel does the best job of that. Also, co-browsing and co-sharing, you don't have that facility on Zoom.
So, you know, when you share your screen, it's just one application or one web page. You can't actually do things together. Just you, yeah. Some of those tools, they're okay, but they're not the best. So I would always suggest...
trying to find another tool. But that kind of brings us to what we're going to talk about today with Yan, which is Fun Class, which kind of tries to... put all of those elements into one tool and again there's no perfect solution it's always going to vary depending on your students but the good thing about fun class is it does kind of
put into play a lot of these elements to make it as easy as possible. So you have almost everything you need, hopefully, which is why we're really excited to talk about this today. Cool. Yeah, let's bring her on. So hello, welcome in. We're very excited to have you here with us today. hello everyone hi daniel fey it's great to be a guest to hear on your podcast
Yeah, we're really excited to talk to you about how to make classes engaging and fun and also talk a little bit about your project, which is FunClass. But before we get into that, Jan, could you tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to co-found FunClass? Yeah, sure. So just to introduce a little bit about my background, my name is Yan and I'm originally from Shanghai, China.
And I'm an online tutor for eight years. I teach mainly Chinese students, primary and secondary school year. And the reason why I co-founded Fan Class is actually from my own tutoring experience. I was mainly using Zoom or Vogue, which is Chinese counterpart of Zoom. They're mainly for business conferencing, right? It's not for online tutoring. So I find quite challenging and frustrating to engage my young learners using this kind of platform.
um since i also teach a lot of group classes it's very easy for the student to get distracted because there are not many interactive tools to keep them focused and motivated so at that moment i had this idea of using some gamification features or functions to make my students more engaged So I was looking for some other alternative.
However, unfortunately, I didn't find anything that matches my imagination of an ideal platform. So at that moment, I thought, well, if I can't find anything that suits my need. why not creating one by myself? Because I am the educator. I have all of the insights about the pedagogy and the tools I need, right, to better engage my students.
The problem is that I'm not a developer. I am a very... skillful and experienced the tutor but i'm not a developer so i can't make the platform by myself so that's why last year um i had the opportunity and i would say a great um like i was a great adventure yeah to find a Perfect technical co-founder to embark on this journey together. And now it's been one year and a half. We are building Funclass together and just been an amazing journey. We've met so many amazing tutors.
um and other people like you both here so yeah that's kind of my background and a story how I co-founded That's amazing and it's great that you kind of took matters into your own hands. Now, what are some of the key principles you believe are essential for making classes engaging for young learners? So you mentioned there's a huge gap in that with the platforms we had before. So what do you think those needs are and how does FunClass achieve that?
Absolutely. So one of my key beliefs is that we need to make learning more fun. in order for young learners to learn better right because for the young learner their attention span is relatively shorter so it can be really challenging for them to just sit in front of the computer without doing anything interactive
So that is the key thing, like to make online lessons more interactive, more playful, etc. So that is number one. And that is exactly what FunClass focused on. We use a lot of interactive tools, Gimify. features, etc. to get lessons more visual and more exciting for the kids. Just to give an example, we have a gamified interactive quiz. Features the students fighting a virtual monster by answering the quiz.
so it's really fun for the kids when they get the questions right they get points and then they can attack the monster and then if you're gonna run then the monster will attack their pack
So that's kind of one example of using gamification to make the learning more fun and engaging for the kids. And I feel like another principle which I hold very valuable for my... is to use a lot of like a collaboration activities especially when it comes to group learning yeah because the students they learn best when there are some peers around So they can actually have that sense of community, peer support as well. And they're actually more engaged with other children in the lab.
so again like on fun class we have the interactive whiteboard for the students to collaborate together maybe like to draw together or to do something writing an article together etc so yeah i believe collaboration is another great tool to get students more involved in the online learning. those are great great tools and also not just for young learners i feel like yeah even for adults
Yeah. What would you say would be the ideal age range for fun class? Is it more younger learners, slightly older? Like what do we think of the ranges that we could use this with? well we started with young learners because that's the gap i identified right and also that's my students age like usually 8 to 12 years old um so i would say fun class is best for students ages 6 to 12. That being said, we do have a lot of adult students. Yeah. Using fun class.
And guess what? The oldest learner on fun class is 17 years old. And as an old lady, she still gets very excited when she gets the points, the rewards from the lesson. And she feels, wow, this is like very different from any other platforms I've ever used. And for an old lady of 17 years old.
she still find it very user friendly yeah she's not very techie right so she can be a little bit uh challenged when it comes to some very technical platforms but she finds fun class very easy to use because yeah we are trying to be very user friendly for young learners so like let's say as young as five years old they can still use fan class independently and as old as 70 years old
That's really nice. Very cool. And I was going to ask as well, this idea of, you know, having a starting out with an egg and evolving into a pet. Where did that idea come from? And why do you think that's such a, you know, why do you think that resonates with the world so well? Yeah, I don't know whether Daniel and Faye, you have heard about Tamagotchi, this game? Oh yeah, of course. Very popular when I was a teen. Yeah, go ahead, sorry.
No, it was very popular here in Brazil, even when I was a teen. Oh, right. this word actually comes from japanese which means egg tamago that means egg so that's the one of the popular games when i was a child as well i remember i cried so much to beg for a Tamagotchi when I was like 10 or 8 years old. And I got my first Tamagotchi when I was a child. And I think even though nowadays 20 years have passed... Still, this kind of pet development game is very popular among kids.
And that's where this idea came from. Why not using a pet development game as a visual representation of students learning program? Because when the path is growing, that means the student's learning is also progressing. So the students can only get the points or the food from the teacher when they show some real progress or effort. So that's kind of a visual representation of the student's learning journey. If the pet is growing, that means their ability is also growing.
yes i feel like that's a very good way one way uh to give the students more fun and also responsibility since they have to take care of pets right they have to feed the pet constantly and secondly it's a visual representation of their learning That's awesome, yeah. And can the students go in between classes, after classes to check on that pad and maintain that kind of nurturing process? Is that something they can do?
Yeah, so during the lesson, the students cannot engage with the pet. The only thing is that when they get the points or the rewards, the pet will pop up on their window cheering for them. Hey, congratulations, you got a certain amount of points.
i'm so proud of you right so that's kind of like support from their path as a learning companion but since the lesson is still focused on learning students cannot do any playful games with the pack unless the lesson is over then they can go to the pet dining room to feed the pet using the food they just earned from the yeah so all of these fun things are more like after lesson reward whereas during the lesson it's more focusing on learning because
For a fun class, we really, really want to strike a balance between game, fun, and also learning. We don't want the lesson to be distracting, right? yeah great and and now speaking of that balancing and all the challenges that may come how do you handle challenges such as maybe varying attention spans or different learning styles when using that's a great question so in terms of uh retaining students attention fun class actually has a function called attention tracker
So how it works, basically, it tracks the focus of students screen. OK, so let's say right now the students are using fun class for a lesson. Right. But during the class, for example, they're distracted or bored. They go to another tab or go to another app. for more than one minute fun class can detect that
And then it will give the teacher a notification saying that maybe Yan might not be paying attention. So 5 HP deducted. So it has some consequence for the student's pet if they are not focused. yeah that the pet will lose life if they don't focus so actually it's a very powerful tool to make the student constantly focus in the lesson because yeah some consequence for their pet, right? And they have the responsibility for taking care.
So they are very focused now in my lesson. So I feel like that's one of the game changer features for me as a tutor. Since I started to use FunClass, none of my students dare to look at other screens. Well, and I think also it might be not just that the punishment side of it, but it's good for the teacher to know that they're losing interest. And then maybe it's time to move on to a different activity or something. Exactly. That's so important when it comes to online learning.
you cannot see the student screen right you have no idea what they're doing sometimes the students might be focusing but actually they're looking at another screen they're very good at acting so my student so fun class gives the transparency to the teacher yeah to tell them when a student might not be focusing so the teacher can immediately call back attention of that student if that happens
love it it's a really really unique way to kind of get the attention of the students and even just notice that because like you said with a group class or with a few students you might not notice it right away and yeah it might be too late so that's a really great tool as well
Jan, what advice would you give to teachers who might be struggling to keep their young learners motivated and interested in their classes? What are some other strategies or techniques that you found would work really well for them? Yeah. I would say definitely use more interactive activities in the lesson. So for example, I know a lot of teachers are using Genually. It's a web app for...
just to create some interactive slides, right? So instead of a PowerPoint, generally enables the teachers to create some drag and drop or click.
activities etc so it's not just a mere screen sharing but the students can actually engage with the teacher to click on the buttons to drag and drop on the screen etc that works extremely well when it comes to young learners because they really want to do something with their hands right so that's kind of the nature of young learners they want they learn best when they are engaged with some hands-on
activities. So that's I find I find super helpful in my tutor and I see a lot of other tutors are using this kind of tools to engage learners. so on fun class we have this code browser feature which enables the teachers. students to go on any website to play games or to use any other websites to interact with each other so yeah a lot of teachers are actually using the code browser function of fun class to go to these websites yeah to make their lessons more interactive
so definitely yeah this kind of more interactive activities and lessons even using the whiteboard right to plug game together so draw on the whiteboard like pictionary the students can draw something and the teachers can guess the the word etc it can also be a very fun activity for the students to do rather than just sitting in front of a computer without doing anything yeah definitely yeah that's good because that's usually what we miss from the face-to-face interaction is that
you know, those activities or those moments in class where everybody gets really hands-on with the teacher and everything else. So yeah, I like that co-browsing idea. I like co-browsing as well because I think a lot of teachers, again, they generally stick to just... presenting slides or presenting some material on the screen and again
You don't know really if the students engaged, if they're following, if they're really understanding. So this concept of co-browsing is also really, really helpful. This is great. So, Jan, how can our listeners connect with you? How can they find out more about FunClass? What can they go to maybe learn a little bit more about it?
Yeah, sure. So the easiest way to reach out to me is on LinkedIn. So you can just type Yan Wen, W-E-N-G. That's my surname. And you can find me on LinkedIn. And if you want to learn more about Fun Class, you can just Google Fun Class and then you will find... And we're also active on different social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. So if you search fan class, you can find, yeah, a lot of resources.
teachers are interested in learning more about fun class we do have a lot of tutorials demo videos on youtube as well so you can see by yourself how the platform works And speaking of that, I just want to highlight that FunClass is not just a virtual classroom. It is a comprehensive, everything in one platform as well. So it includes homework management. feedback collection from the students, feedback sharing, like teacher report for the students.
scheduling as well and next year we're going to uh integrate payment system as well so teachers can actually directly get paid on fan class by the pair Yeah, so FunClass aims to become everything in one platform so the teachers don't need to subscribe to dozens of different softwares. Yeah, our ideal dream. is to really just use one software that can save the budgets of the tutors to make affordable and also saving their allot time. So that is kind of the game changer we're trying to become.
That's great. Yeah. I remember when I started online teaching, it was overwhelming to think of all the different things I had to sign up for and pay for and learn to use. Right. Now, if our teachers are interested in getting started with trying fun class. How do they do that? Do you have any offers you can share with our listeners here?
Of course. So at the moment, FunClass offers a 30-day free trial. So anyone who is interested in FunClass, you can directly sign up for free and then test it out with your students. to see how they react to this new platform. And of course, I think for your podcast, our listeners can use our discount coupon to get even more. cheaper price yeah for fun classes
Amazing. Yeah, we'll drop that link below the episode description. So you can just give that a click and get started for free and try it out and see if it's for you. And that would be hopefully a really useful tool for our teachers to try and to experiment and hopefully.
really give the teaching business a kickstart in 2025. That's awesome. Yep. Thank you so much for taking some time. We really appreciate it. Thank you everyone for listening. And we are looking forward to the next podcast with everyone. So thank you, Yan, one more time. That was very interesting. a new tool for us to try out and if you are interested in trying it out
Like Yann said, right now you can get one month free trial. And if you use our code ESLtalk, you get 10% off if you do decide to sign up. Maybe this is your sign to give it a go. I think so. You know, I was really excited to learn more about this tool because, like I said, it kind of solves all the problems that we discussed, helps keep your learners engaged, keeps them motivated, gives them things to do between the classes. The homework is there.
and it's totally free to try for a month so you know nothing to lose and Hopefully it helps kind of meet the need and fill in that gap that you might be looking for. And if you out there do try it out, send us your notes on it. Let us know what you think about it. Any feedback you may have for Yann and yeah, for us, that would be great.
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