The Official Chineseathome Blog

Chineseathome offered a training program for 67 students who are in their last year of college studies majoring Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language from North China Institute of Science and Technology on Jan. 12 2010. The students completed a three-hour training program that targeted on how to teach online, the differences between traditional and online Chinese teaching, how to use CORS and ViSR system, and practical techniques in online teaching.

The training onsite  – the students

To inspire students to excel in online Chinese teaching, Chineseathome’s experienced teacher Elaine who have 8 years of Chinese teaching experiences demonstrated how make full use of online tools in the real class environment. In the multimedia classroom, all trainees could follow trainers’ instruction to experience it by practices.

The best candidates will receive intensive training and be selected for Chineseathome’s associate teachers. In their future internship, they are assigned some basic work such as class preparation, teachers’ time table arrangement and giving trial lessons. After the internship, the qualified students will become the formal teachers of Chineseathome by judging their internship performance.

2009 was a busy and harvest year for Chineseathome, as we not only enriched our lesson contents our students love, but also developed new features and applications that satisfy their learning needs. After looking back at the lessons, teachers’ review, students’ feedback and feature updates, we’ve assembled a review of all the things we brought you in 2009.

Chinese Characters course was added with new contents (basic conversational phrases and sentences) and renamed as Conversational Chinese for Beginners. This course is the ideal transitional course for students who have finished their Pinyin studies.

Bundled course booking enables students to book their lessons at fixed time in a certain period of time.

In ViSR, Students can now take the lessons with their teachers through live web camera without using any third party software. The photo display area is replaced with video screen if web camera is in use.

Online Chinese assessment database are added with more questions which are based on mock HSK test. And the listening part will be available soon.

Chineseathome offers one-many Chinese learning program (group learning). If some students were not included in an existing lesson, the teacher could also invite the student to attend in the middle of the class.

Our Chinese teachers write their blogs about their teaching experience, Chinese culture, Chinese language and traditional Chinese stories.

Audio integration allows students to communicate in virtual classroom with different audio software such as Skype, Gtalk, telephone and cell phone. They can choose any of the above mentioned software no matter what others use.

16 Chinese teachers with 7, 8 years Chinese language teaching experience have joined Chineseathome. Some of the teachers have worked or studied abroad for several years with a comprehensive understanding of both Chinese culture and western culture.

North China Institute of Science and Technology and Chineseathome establish internship base for the students majoring in teaching Chinese as a second language in NCIST. The students will not only receive the training from Chineseathome’s experienced teachers, but also have the opportunities to participate in the course design with the Chinese linguistic experts.

Although Chineseathome gradually gain its reputation among Chinese language learners, we had a wonderful 2009 to flesh out new content, as well as the increasing needs of the students. In 2010, we planned to bring you the greatest comfort to study Chinese at home with more informative content and new applications.