Introducing Engoo's Newest Lesson Room Features

At Engoo, we're constantly finding new ways to streamline the lesson experience so our tutors and students can focus on the important things: teaching and learning. We're happy to present two of our latest feature updates: virtual backgrounds and dictionary synching.

Virtual Backgrounds

Did you notice our new backgrounds? That's right, when you open a lesson room now you'll be able to pick from several different virtual backgrounds.

Follow these steps to set the virtual background of your choice:

1. Click on the settings button (the gear icon) in the upper left corner of the lesson room.
2. In the Call Settings window that appears, check "Add a call background effect."
3. Select the background of your choice and voila! You'll be magically transported to an office, beach, classroom, or cafe!

Alternatively, if you're like the Engoo owl (pictured) and just want to hide the clutter in your living room, go with the "blur" option.

For you minimalists out there, there's always the monotone "pale blue" and "pale orange" backgrounds. And during holidays, we'll also release themed backgrounds like this one for Halloween.

Besides being great conversation starters, these backgrounds can also serve as holiday-themed picture description exercises. For example, the Halloween background is a great excuse to teach students words like "ghost," "haunted house," "graveyard," "bats," and "spooky."

Conveniently, as long as you stick to the same browser, the background you select will be automatically applied to your next lesson too.

Virtual backgrounds use very little bandwidth (especially compared to the video calls themselves), so they shouldn't interfere with your lesson. However, if you do encounter internet issues, we recommend temporarily disabling the background.

Synchronized Dictionary

Our built-in dictionary feature has been out for about half a year now, and we hope you've found it useful. We know that it saves us a lot of time coming up with example sentences for popular vocabulary words!

Besides adding new entries every day, we've also upgraded the dictionary so that it's now a shared activity like the rest of the lesson room. That means that when you use the dictionary feature, your student can see what you're doing in real time.

As shown in the photo below, when you highlight text in the dictionary, it'll also be highlighted on your student's screen. And when you click on a photo, it'll enlarge on both screens too.

A red dot will show up on the student's screen to let them know you're using the dictionary so they can join.

And did we mention that our dictionary is trilingual? It supports searches in Japanese and Chinese, so students in these countries can use this function to quickly look up how to say a word in English using their mother tongue. For example, here's the entry for the Japanese word for English:

👋 That's It For Now!

We hope these new features make your lessons more fun and productive! If you have any suggestions for new features, feel free to let us know through Tutor Support. Happy tutoring!