As the new school year begins, teachers are once again getting to grips with a changing landscape. Many are running virtual classrooms. Many others are running social-distanced physical classrooms. And then there are those that are doing both. Yet, the leeway that they felt in Spring to allow them to muddle through is no longer visible. Now, they are expected to be masters in blended learning. They’ve been re-writing all their resources and activities to adapt to virtual learning. They’re making sure that students are still receiving the right level of attention, care, and education that they would during the ‘old normal’.
As the pandemic unfolded earlier in the year, we all upped our game. We put in the extra hours to make sure that we could keep students learning. We didn’t mind the extra hours, that’s what you do in a crisis, isn’t it? Muck in and get on. But, we’re still in a crisis. And there are a lot of overworked teachers out there pulling their hair out.
Less than a week into the school year, a representative from Kansas National Education Association said “It’s unsustainable. We don’t think things can continue as they are”.
Marcus Baltzell, the spokesperson for the Kansas National Education Association said. “It’s becoming such an overwhelming challenge that many teachers are resigning early”…“Many are just outright quitting.”
Now, this is not a localized issue, this is being reflected throughout the USA, but unfortunately, not everyone can walk away from the pressure of the job, many have mortgages to pay, family to feed, and partners who have lost their jobs and businesses to the company.
But with that, comes another way to help those teachers (and a chance to top up your own income at the same time) – enter the Virtual Teaching Assistant!
What is a Virtual Teaching Assistant?
Every cloud has a silver lining as they say. With teachers trying to plan lessons that suit virtual and physical classrooms, create presentations for both, resources, assignments, worksheets, activities, and all that before they’ve even begun to think about differentiation and extension exercises, there is barely enough time to teach, let alone find any form of work-life balance.
So many are taking advantage of the services of virtual learning assistants to keep them on top of things. In the first waves of the pandemic, teachers panicked about what resources they had and many picked up online resources to plug the gaps. These resources serve their purpose, but still, need a bit of adapting to fit with particular topics or the needs of their particular students.
Virtual Teaching Assistants can provide customized lesson plans and resources that are exactly what teacher needs, fit for purpose and based on the brief given directly by the teacher…as well as giving the teachers back a little bit of their evening to check in with their own children, sit down to a family meal and who knows, maybe even watch an episode of something on Netflix the rest of the world is talking about.
And right now, when half of them are ready to throw in the towel, paying someone else to do some of their work while they stick at their job is the perfect solution.
So, if you’re looking to build a freelance business and have teaching and resource planning experience, now is the time to act.
Filling the Need of Supply and Demand
Supply and Demand is the name of the freelancing game. Find out what people need and give it to them.
Below is a list of the most popular virtual teaching assistant tasks that are being outsourced to freelancers, so if you have a computer at home and the time to do the work, then this is the gig for you!
- Lesson planning
- Interactive presentations
- Topic and Subject Research
- Activities, Quizzes, and Exercises
- Worksheets and Step-by-Step Guides
- Formative and Summative Assessments
- Organizing and Filing resources
- Marking and Proofreading
- Data Entry
- Data Analysis and Report writing
This all is hugely time-consuming at the end of a day’s teaching to pull together. However, with a good brief and guidance from a teacher, it can be farmed out to ease the load.
How to Get Started
Most virtual teaching assistants are offering their services online and through freelancer sites such as Fiverr, with a set hourly rate that people can purchase to support them with whatever they need. Another product of the package you can offer is to design a customized lesson plan with associated resources and presentations for a specific duration, topic, student group. You may charge this as a set price for delivering everything, rather than an hourly rate.
The freelancer site route is very simple. You decide on a rate or price for your customized product, write a profile including your skills and experience, and ‘go live’. Customers can buy your services.
There are no set up costs and nothing to lose. The Fiverr payment is taken from your earning, at 20% initially, which you can decrease over time if you are a top seller). So, even if you get no orders, you won’t lose anything other than the time you took to write up your profile and packages. And not getting orders is unlikely. There is a large number of teachers screaming out for your help.
Whatever your expertise, there is now most definitely a market-ready and waiting for you. If creative digital resources are your thing – then get creating. If organization and planning are your skills – then get organizing! Why not sell your administrative support services? You’re getting the teacher’s lessons and resources planned, checked, and stored accordingly. Oh, how I’d love someone to organize my life for me!
Virtual teaching is new, and with that comes challenges for teachers. But where a challenge arises for one, an opportunity arises for another…so climb onboard the virtual teaching assistant train and drive it all the way to the bank. Who doesn’t want an extra income stream right now, well anytime really, but especially now… so get going, the teachers need you!
