The online language teacher's tool stack

Most “best tools for online teachers” lists are affiliate pages with twenty entries. This one is organised by the jobs that need doing, because the honest answer is that you need about four tools and the rest is noise.

Here is the whole stack:

JOB                        MINIMUM              WHAT IT COSTS YOU IF WRONG
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Talk to the student        Zoom / Meet          Lessons that fall over
Share the language         Google Doc           Nothing to review after
Get paid                   Bank transfer        Chasing invoices
Schedule                   Calendar + email     An hour a week in timezones
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Capture the lesson         ← the expensive gap → 8+ unpaid hours a week
Review between lessons     Anki                 Forgotten vocabulary

The bottom two rows are where the real money is, and they are the two most teachers skip.

Job 1: Video

Zoom and Google Meet are both fine. The differences that matter for languages specifically:

Audio processing is your enemy. Both platforms apply aggressive noise suppression and dynamic range compression by default. This is excellent for a business call and actively harmful for pronunciation work — the processing removes high-frequency energy, which is exactly where sibilant contrasts (/s/ vs /ʃ/, /s/ vs /θ/) live. A student’s /θ/ can be perfect and arrive at your ear as /s/.

In Zoom: Settings → Audio → Original Sound for Musicians, on. In Meet: turn off noise cancellation. Do this once and forget it; it changes what you can hear enough to change what you can teach.

Recording. Zoom’s local recording is more reliable and produces a file you own. Meet’s recording requires a paid Workspace tier. If you want to send students recordings of their own speech — which is one of the highest-value things you can do — this matters.

Latency is 150–300 ms on both, which is why simultaneous repetition does not work over video and why the teaching method has to change rather than merely relocate.

Skip: dedicated “classroom” platforms with virtual whiteboards, unless you teach children. Adults do not need a whiteboard; they need text they can keep.

Job 2: Somewhere the language lives

This is the tool choice that most affects student outcomes, and most teachers default into it without thinking.

A shared Google Doc is the honest baseline. It is free, it is collaborative in real time, the student keeps access forever, and it works on a phone. Most successful online teachers run on exactly this.

Its limits show up quickly:

• No audio, so no model to review against
• No phonetic transcription without hand-typing IPA
• No review scheduling — it is a wall of text that grows until it is unopenable
• Chronological, so month-old material is buried under new material

A document is a record. What a learner needs is a queue — a small set of items surfacing at the right time. That distinction is why documents get abandoned around month three: not because the student stopped caring, but because a 40-page doc has no entry point.

Notion or OneNote solve the organisation problem and none of the language problems. Better structure, still no audio, still no transcription, still no scheduling.

A purpose-built lesson tool — this is where Teachee sits — collapses the capture step: you record a sentence during the lesson and get transcript, translation, phonetic transcription and audio in one action, on the student’s screen, immediately, in a form that can become a reviewable deck or an Anki export. Full comparison in Teachee vs Google Docs.

Job 3: Review between lessons

A weekly lesson is roughly 1% of a student’s waking week. What happens in the other 99% determines whether they progress, and by default the answer is nothing.

Anki is the serious option: free on desktop and Android, expensive one-off on iOS, ugly, and unmatched at what it does. The scheduling algorithm is the product; the interface is a tax you pay for it.

The failure mode is not Anki. It is what teachers put in it — decks of isolated word pairs, which produce students who can translate a list and cannot form a sentence. Cards should be sentences, ideally with audio, ideally sentences from the student’s own lessons.

Quizlet is friendlier and its scheduling is weaker; see Anki vs Quizlet for the actual difference and when the friendlier option is the right call.

Job 4: Scheduling and payment

Below about eight regular students, a calendar and email is fine. Above it, timezone arithmetic and rescheduling quietly consume an hour a week.

Calendly (or Cal.com, which is open source and free) removes the negotiation and handles timezones correctly, which you will not do reliably by hand across a DST boundary.

For payment, the real decision is marketplace vs. independent:

	Marketplace (italki, Preply)	Independent
Commission	15–33%	~2% card fees
Student acquisition	Provided	Yours to solve
Rate control	Constrained	Total
Relationship	Platform owns it	You own it

The usual arc is to start on a marketplace to build a base, then move regular students off it. That transition is worth planning before you need it — including where your lesson materials live, because “all my students’ history is inside the platform” is a real switching cost.

Where the hours actually go

Ask a teacher how long a lesson takes and they say sixty minutes. Then measure it.

Per 60-minute lesson, honestly measured
───────────────────────────────────────
Teaching                     60 min   ← paid
Preparation                   5–15
Notes and materials after    10–25   ← the sinkhole
Admin, scheduling, payment     3–5
───────────────────────────────────────
Real time per paid hour      78–105 min

At twenty-five lessons a week, the “notes and materials” row alone is four to ten unpaid hours. That is the single largest inefficiency in the job, and it is almost entirely mechanical work: typing a sentence someone just said, looking up its translation, finding its phonetic transcription, building a flashcard.

None of that requires teaching judgement. All of it requires teacher time.

The tools worth paying for are the ones that attack that row. A better whiteboard does not. A tool that turns a spoken sentence into a transcribed, translated, phonetically annotated, reviewable card while you are still talking about it does — which is precisely the gap Teachee was built for.

A recommended minimum stack

For someone starting:

1. Google Meet — free, nothing to install, works everywhere
2. A shared doc per student — free, permanent, student keeps it
3. Cal.com — free scheduling with correct timezone handling
4. Bank transfer or Wise — lowest fees, fine at low volume

For someone with fifteen-plus regular students, where unpaid hours have become the constraint:

1. Zoom with Original Sound enabled, and local recording
2. A lesson tool that captures during the lesson rather than a doc you fill afterwards
3. Anki for the students who will use it, seeded from lesson material
4. Calendly or Cal.com, plus Stripe invoicing

The upgrade to make first is not the video platform. It is row five of that table — the capture step — because that is the only one that pays you back in hours rather than in polish.