Comparison
Teachee vs a shared Google Doc for lesson notes
Most online language teachers run on a shared document, and for good reasons. Here is exactly where that breaks down, and where a document is still the right answer.
A shared Google Doc is the default tool of online language teaching, and it deserves the position. It is free, it is collaborative in real time, the student keeps access forever, it works on every device, and there is nothing to learn.
Most successful online teachers run on exactly this. If you are one of them and it is working, the honest recommendation is: keep going. The rest of this page is about the specific points where it stops working, so you can recognise them when you hit them.
What the document does well
Zero friction. Both parties already have an account. No install, no onboarding, no explaining anything to a 62-year-old student in week one.
Real-time co-editing. You type a sentence, it appears on their screen. For a language lesson this is genuinely valuable — the student sees the written form while hearing the spoken one.
Permanence and ownership. The student keeps the document if they stop lessons, if you stop teaching, or if you fall out. This matters more than teachers usually credit. Materials locked inside a platform become a hostage situation the moment anyone wants to leave.
Infinite flexibility. Tables, images, links, colour, whatever structure you invent. No product designer has decided what a lesson looks like.
Free. Not “free tier”. Free.
Where it breaks
1. No audio
This is the largest gap and it is structural. A language is a sound system, and a document holds text.
A student reviewing Je n’y suis jamais allé from a doc is reviewing spelling. They cannot hear the liaison, they cannot check their own pronunciation against a model, and if their internal reading of the sentence is wrong — which for French, English or Danish it very often is — the document faithfully reinforces the error every time they open it.
Workarounds exist: link Forvo, embed a Drive file, record voice notes separately. All of them are per-item manual work, which means in practice they happen for the first three sentences and then stop.
2. Phonetic transcription is impractical
There is no IPA keyboard. Typing /ˈaʊ̯sˌʃpʁaːxə/ into a doc means finding an online IPA picker, clicking twelve symbols, and pasting.
Nobody does this twenty times a lesson. So document-based notes overwhelmingly contain no pronunciation information at all, and pronunciation work evaporates the moment the call ends — which is precisely the failure mode described in teaching pronunciation online.
3. It is a record, not a queue
This is the deep one.
A document stores things chronologically. It has no concept of when something should be seen again. After three months, a weekly student’s doc is forty pages, ordered by date, with the material from March buried under the material from June.
What a learner needs is the opposite: a small set of items surfacing at the moment they are about to be forgotten. That is spaced repetition, and a document cannot do it — not because Google Docs is deficient, but because a document is the wrong data structure for the job.
The observable symptom: students stop opening the doc around month three. Not from lost motivation, but because a 40-page chronological document has no obvious entry point. There is nothing to do with it.
4. Capture during the lesson is manual
Typing a sentence, its translation, and any pronunciation note while also teaching is real cognitive load. So most teachers write notes afterwards, from memory, which costs ten to twenty-five minutes per lesson and loses the specific sentences the student reached for and failed to produce — the single most valuable material in the hour.
At twenty-five lessons a week that is four to ten unpaid hours, which is the largest single inefficiency in the job.
5. Nothing exports
A doc is a doc. It does not become an Anki deck, a quiz, or an audio playlist without someone retyping it.
What Teachee does differently
Teachee is built around the capture step rather than the storage step.
You record a sentence during the lesson. What appears on the student’s screen — immediately, while you are still discussing it — is the transcript, the translation, and the phonetic transcription, with the audio attached. That set becomes a reviewable deck, and it exports to Anki.
The four gaps above map onto this directly:
| Gap | How it closes |
|---|---|
| No audio | The recording is the item; text is derived from it |
| No IPA | Transcription is generated, not typed |
| Record not queue | Items become a deck with review scheduling |
| Manual capture | Capture is one action, mid-lesson, in seconds |
| No export | Anki export built in |
What it does not do is replace your judgement about which sentence matters. Choosing what to capture is teaching. Typing it out afterwards is not.
Honest limitations
It is opinionated. A document lets you invent any structure. Teachee assumes lessons are made of sentences with audio, translation and transcription. If your teaching does not decompose that way — exam prep, business writing, literary discussion — a document may genuinely suit you better.
Another account for the student. Small, real friction, particularly with older or less technical students.
Not free. A document is. This is a straightforward trade of money for hours, and the arithmetic only favours the tool once you have enough lessons that the unpaid hours hurt.
IPA transcription coverage varies by language. Automatic phonetic transcription is available for a specific set of languages; outside those, you get transcript, translation and audio but not IPA. Check the language guides for what is supported where.
When each one is right
Stay with the document if:
- You have fewer than about eight regular students
- Your lessons are mostly conversation with light note-taking
- Notes take you five minutes and your students open them
- You teach something that is not primarily sentence-shaped
Move if:
- After-lesson admin is eating five or more hours a week
- Pronunciation is central and none of it survives the lesson
- Students stop opening the doc around month three
- You want students to review between lessons and nothing currently makes that happen
The document is not a bad tool. It is a general tool being used for a specific job, and it does that job well right up until the point where the volume of unpaid work becomes the thing limiting your practice.
Frequently asked questions
Is a Google Doc good enough for language lesson notes?
For a small number of students and lessons that are mostly conversation, yes — it is free, permanent, collaborative and works on a phone. It breaks down on audio, phonetic transcription, review scheduling, and the fact that a chronological document becomes unopenable after about three months.
What is the main limitation of using a document for lesson notes?
It is a record, not a queue. Everything is stored chronologically with no mechanism for resurfacing material at the right time, so month-old vocabulary is buried under new material and never reviewed.
Can I put IPA in a Google Doc?
You can paste it, but there is no keyboard for it, so in practice teachers either skip phonetic transcription or spend a minute per word hunting symbols. That friction is why most document-based notes contain no pronunciation information at all.
Should I switch away from Google Docs?
Only if the unpaid hours after lessons have become your constraint, or if pronunciation and review are central to how you teach. If notes take you five minutes and your students are happy, the document is fine.