Teaching the skill of teleconferencing

As someone who has written published materials for teaching the language of business teleconferences, I can confirm how difficult it is to prepare students for this most difficult of modern business communication skills. Even in your own language, it can be a very confusing process for the following reasons:
– some people can see each other and some people can’t
– technical problems (often caused by people’s inability to deal with the technology rather than the technology itself)
– the need for chairing skills which includes nominating the speaker and giving very explicit instructions on how the meeting will go

For teachers, it’s especially important to recognise that teleconferencing is less about the ‘telephoning’ aspect and more about the ‘meeting’ aspect. All those expressions you teach in meetings lessons come in really useful for teleconferencing.

With advanced students, you could start off a lesson by showing them this wonderful…