All answers›Online Tutoring Platforms

How do I run online tutoring lessons for students with dyslexia? (Or: what makes a virtual classroom good for structured-literacy tutoring)

Yes — independent tutors trained in Orton-Gillingham, Wilson, Barton, IMSE, Take Flight, LiPS, or any other structured-literacy approach run online lessons with dyslexic students every day, and the workflow works. What changes when the lesson moves online is not the pedagogy: multisensory instruction, explicit phonology, systematic phonics, controlled decodable text, and cumulative review are all still the plan. What changes is how you deliver the multisensory pieces through a screen, how you keep a student with a short working-attention window engaged for the back half of a 45-minute session, and how you keep parents included in a process that only works if they can see progress. A virtual classroom fit for structured-literacy tutoring needs a shared visual surface both of you can act on (not just a screen share), drag-and-drop tokens for phoneme and word-building work, a way to bring the tutor's existing structured-literacy web resources into the same room, a small-frequent-reward mechanic that reinforces effort rather than "correct answers," and — for many SpLD tutors — a way to record the decoding sequence so a parent can review it during the week.

What "structured-literacy tutoring online" is (and what it isn't)

The reader we're writing for is a tutor already trained in a structured-literacy approach. If you're an Orton-Gillingham practitioner, a Wilson-certified tutor, working through Barton or IMSE, using Take Flight, LiPS, Lindamood-Bell, or any of the systematic-phonics programs the International Dyslexia Association groups under the umbrella term "structured literacy," this page is for you. We're not teaching you the method — you already know it. We're covering the parts that change when the delivery moves from an in-person table to a browser tab.

Structured-literacy tutoring online is not:

  • Reading practice with an app. Apps that drill sight words or phonics can be useful supplementary tools, but a structured-literacy lesson is a live, guided session with explicit teacher-controlled sequencing — not a game the student plays alone.
  • A generic ESL reading lesson. ESL reading pedagogy overlaps with structured literacy but doesn't replace it. Dyslexic learners (in any language) need the systematic, cumulative, multisensory sequence — see how do I teach reading to ESL students online? for the generic ESL side.
  • A video call with a worksheet on screen-share. Screen-share turns the student into a passive watcher; a structured-literacy lesson turns on the student doing — tapping tokens, writing sounds, blending onto a card, tracking a finger under a word. The delivery has to preserve that.

Three constraints that change when the lesson moves online

Every SpLD tutor we've spoken to who's moved a practice online reports the same three constraints in the first month:

  • Multisensory delivery through a screen. In-person, you use physical letter tiles, sand trays, tapping fingers, arm sweeps, coloured cards. Online, the tokens are digital — the student needs to be able to manipulate them, not just see them. That means your platform's whiteboard has to support drag-and-drop objects that both you and the student can move, with real-time updates on both sides. A whiteboard that only the teacher can annotate isn't enough.
  • Attention stamina for a full session. Dyslexic students often have overlapping attention and working-memory profiles (ADHD comorbidity is common); a 45-minute session at a screen is harder than the same session at a table. You'll structure differently — shorter drill segments, more movement/brain breaks, more frequent reinforcement — and your platform needs to support the breaks without kicking the student out of the room.
  • Parent involvement without you in the house. The parent isn't in the room, but the intervention only works if home reinforcement continues between sessions. That means the parent needs a clear window into what happened in each lesson — a written recap, a recording of the decoding drill, a specific "practice this word list this week" — delivered on a channel the parent actually opens.

What the shared canvas has to do (multisensory in the browser)

Preserving the multisensory piece is the single hardest thing to get right online. The specific whiteboard capabilities that make it work:

  • Drag-and-drop tokens both sides can move. Letter tiles for building words. Coloured tokens for Elkonin-box style phoneme boxes. Syllable-type cards. Morpheme chunks. The student has to be able to grab a token and move it, not just watch. On Koala Go's whiteboard, Sticky-note objects and Stamp images both drag on the shared canvas and update live for every participant in the room — you place a row of empty boxes on the canvas, the student drags a phoneme token into each box as they segment the word, and both of you see the same state.
  • Fine drawing for letter formation. If the tutor's method includes handwriting or sky-writing, the whiteboard needs a smooth pen — a stylus on iPad, a graphics tablet, or even a good trackpad. Precision matters for letter-form modelling, especially for the reversal-prone letters (b/d/p/q) where the tutor is drawing the correct form and the student is copying it beneath.
  • Text you can highlight, colour, and mark. Decoding practice on a controlled text: mark the vowel red, underline the consonant blend, dot every syllable break, sweep an arrow under the words the student reads. The annotations need to persist across the session so you (and the parent, later, on a recording) can trace the exact sequence the student worked through.
  • Slide / PDF upload for your existing materials. Structured-literacy tutors typically have a large personal library — decodable readers, word lists, syllable-division worksheets, spelling dictation sheets — accumulated over years. A whiteboard that takes PDF and PowerPoint upload with annotation on top preserves that library instead of asking you to rebuild it in a new tool.
  • A student view that shows what you show. Simple, but not universal — the student sees the same canvas you see, not a mirrored / laterally-flipped view. Reversal-prone learners don't need any additional orientation friction.

Structuring the online session for shorter attention windows

A typical 45-minute in-person Orton-Gillingham lesson has a sequence something like: phoneme review → new phonogram introduction → controlled reading → dictation → decodable-text reading → spelling → summary. Moved online, most tutors we've heard from compress the drill segments (they run faster on-screen with digital tokens than in-person with physical ones) and add explicit micro-breaks. A working template for a 45-minute online lesson:

  1. Warm-up review (5 min). Rapid drill of previously-taught phonograms — flash the sound cards, student says the sound, you tap the next one. Use a slide deck of cards; cycle through faster than you would in-person. This is your temperature check on last week's material.
  2. New content or focused review (10 min). New phonogram, new syllable type, new morpheme, new spelling rule — whatever the method's next step is. Teacher-led, canvas-heavy. This is the segment where the shared canvas earns its cost — you're writing the new grapheme on the whiteboard, the student is copying it beneath, you're both marking the same example word.
  3. Movement or attention break (2 min). A stretch, a short physical activity, sky-writing the new letter with a big arm, walking to a wall and back. Don't skip this; the student's attention needs to reset before the harder segments. Some tutors use the Playground here — a short "walk to the sign, come back" beat with the student's avatar — because it's low-stakes movement inside the same tab.
  4. Word-building / Elkonin boxes (10 min). Drag-and-drop segment. Place empty phoneme boxes on the canvas, dictate a word, student drags tokens into the boxes as they segment. Reverse the exercise: place tokens, student says the whole word. This is the segment where the online delivery is often better than the in-person one — you have unlimited tokens, no lost letter tiles, and the sequence auto-records if you're recording the session.
  5. Decodable text reading (8 min). Open a PDF of the decodable reader on the whiteboard, or open a leveled-reader site through the cobrowser (see the next section). Student reads aloud, you mark difficulty on the canvas, and you follow the student's finger — or their mouse — under the text.
  6. Dictation / spelling (5 min). You dictate, student types or writes on the canvas. If handwriting is part of the method, use the whiteboard's pen tool; if the student is typing, use the Text tool. Both keep the record on the shared canvas for review.
  7. Wrap-up and reward (5 min). Recap the day's target, award effort-based reinforcement (see below), preview the week's home practice for the parent. The last five minutes is where the student decides whether they want to come back next week — make it warm and specific.

The template is a starting point, not a script. Younger learners (age 6-8) usually need shorter drill segments, more breaks, and a hard 30-minute cap; older intervention students (age 12+) can hold longer segments and often prefer them.

Effort-focused reinforcement (why a rewards mechanic matters here specifically)

Structured-literacy work is hard for the student. A dyslexic 8-year-old is putting more cognitive effort into a decoding drill than a typically-reading peer puts into their whole reading period. If your reinforcement pattern rewards only "correct answers," you're rewarding the student's ease, not their effort — and for a dyslexic learner, ease is the least available signal. Every experienced SpLD teacher's manual describes some version of this: reinforce effort, reinforce approximation, reinforce persistence through a hard drill, not just accuracy.

Translated online, the mechanic that makes this work is a small, frequent, teacher-controlled reward currency. On Koala Go, that's Gems: the teacher opens the student panel, picks a student, and gives 1-100 gems in a single click (the amount input is capped between 1 and 100 on purpose — small frequent rewards work better than a single burst). Each gem drops with a sound and a visual, and the student sees their balance update live. Why this matters for a structured-literacy lesson:

  • You control the timing. You can give a gem for a good sky-write attempt, for tapping through a hard word even if the blend didn't work, for trying a phonogram the student got wrong last week — reinforcing the process at the moment the process is happening.
  • The size of the gem matches the size of the effort. A quick correct answer gets 1 gem; a hard attempt on a novel word gets 5; a full week of shown-up-and-tried gets a bigger reward at the end. This is the "variable rewards" pattern established learning-design research supports — variable magnitude holds attention longer than a fixed one-per-correct schedule.
  • The student sees the balance grow. A dyslexic student often can't see their own progress — reading feels no easier at the end of a month of intervention, even though the decoding data says otherwise. A visible reward balance gives them one clear signal that they did do something today. That's more of a retention lever than most tutors expect it to be.

None of this replaces the tutor's real reinforcement — the direct, warm, specific "that was a good try" that the student came for. It's a lightweight second channel that carries some of the reinforcement load between your verbal moments. If gems (or any similar mechanic) feel infantilising for an older student, drop them — for a 14-year-old working on advanced morphology, the on-screen currency is often the wrong tool. For a 7-year-old two months into intervention, it's often what makes the child agree to come back on Wednesday.

Using external structured-literacy tools via the cobrowser

Most SpLD tutors have a set of structured-literacy web resources they already use — decodable text libraries, syllable-division practice sites, phoneme-manipulation web tools, leveled reader libraries. Traditionally on Zoom you'd screen-share and drive the mouse yourself; the student watches you click. A cobrowser (the same feature explained in what is a cobrowser?) changes that — you and the student are on the same live webpage, and either of you can move the cursor, click, type. For structured-literacy work, that unlocks:

  • Leveled reader sites. Reading A-Z, Oxford Owl, Epic, and similar libraries — open the book, the student reads aloud, controls the audio, turns the page. You can highlight or annotate on top of the shared page. Teach from sites your own plan or teacher license covers, and within each site's terms.
  • Web-based structured-literacy activity tools. Whatever your program uses for its digital practice pieces — the student does the activity in real time, you're on the same page, you can pause and take over if the student stalls.
  • Interactive phoneme / syllable practice. Any browser tool that supports drag-and-drop letter or sound tokens becomes usable inside the lesson — the student manipulates the tokens on the same page you're seeing, no "can you see my screen?" loop.
  • Reference sites and word lists. Pull up a phonics reference, an etymology database, or a decodable-word generator during the lesson; the student sees exactly what you're referencing.

One honest caveat on Koala Free: cobrowser sessions on the free tier are time-limited (you get 10 minutes at a time, with a 20-minute cooldown between sessions), which is fine for a single web-activity segment in a 45-minute lesson but not for a lesson where the cobrowser is the main teaching surface. Full-length cobrowser sessions come with Koala Pro.

Recording the lesson for the parent (and for your own records)

Recording is optional but for SpLD work it often pays for itself in retention. A parent who watches a 5-minute clip of their child working through a decoding drill sees the intervention working in a way that a written recap can't convey — the parent can see the hesitation, the correction, the tutor's cue, and the student's second attempt getting to the word. That's the difference between "I hope this is helping" and "I can see this is helping." Practically:

  • Get consent up front. Recording a minor requires parent permission and, in some regions, additional consent — see how do I record online tutoring lessons? for the consent, storage, and sharing side, including a link to a written policy you can adapt.
  • Share short clips, not full recordings. A full 45-minute recording is more content than any parent will watch. Clip the 3-5 minutes that show the target progress — the drill on the new phonogram, the moment the student blended the difficult word, the correction pattern — and share those. Some tutors send one clip a week alongside the written recap.
  • Store for the intervention arc, not forever. An intervention runs on the order of months to years; recordings that long deep-file quickly. Set a retention policy (delete after 90 days, or after the intervention completes) so you're not carrying an unbounded personal archive.

On Koala Go, lesson recording starts on Koala Pro (saved locally to your machine) and cloud recordings of scheduled lessons come with Koala Platinum; either way the recording captures the shared canvas alongside the video, so the parent sees the drill sequence, not just the tutor's face.

1-on-1 vs small group for intervention

The short answer: most SpLD tutors keep serious intervention 1-on-1. Small groups (2-3 same-level students) sometimes work for the phonemic-awareness or spelling components, or for a well-matched pair of siblings, but the individual pacing that structured literacy needs usually breaks in a group of mismatched-need learners. If you're considering the group model for the economics, see how do I teach small group classes online? for the general small-group tradeoffs — and note the "students with specific learning differences that require intensive individual attention" caveat in that page. The families paying specialist rates for SpLD tutoring generally expect 1-on-1 and are right to.

Practical setup on Koala Go for an SpLD tutor

If you're evaluating Koala Go (the platform we build) for a structured-literacy online practice, here's what you actually get, and where the current limits sit:

  • The whiteboard is the workspace. Fabric.js canvas with pen (Path), Sticky-note tokens, Stamp images, Text, and image upload — everything drag-and-drop-able and visible live on both sides of the room. Upload your existing decodable readers, dictation sheets, and phonics worksheets as PDF or PowerPoint (Free-tier caps on uploads; unlimited on Pro), annotate on top of them, and each session's canvas is saved to reopen next week.
  • Per-student Gems for effort-based reinforcement. Each student in the room has their own gem balance. You award 1-100 gems in a single click from the student panel; the transaction shows visibly to the student. Design the gem pattern the way your program prescribes reinforcement — small for participation, larger for a hard attempt, largest for persistence through a difficult drill.
  • Cobrowser for structured-literacy web tools. Open Reading A-Z, Oxford Owl, Epic, ImseLab-style interactive tools, or any browser resource your program uses; the student has real control of the page, not a passive view of your screen. 10 minutes at a time on Free (with cooldown), full-length sessions on Pro.
  • Playground for micro-breaks and stamina. The 3D Playground is a separate tab of the classroom — teacher and student avatars in a shared 3D space, useful for the 2-minute movement break between drill segments or as end-of-lesson reward. Not the teaching surface. On older student devices, drop the Playground Quality setting to Low (see the Quality settings guide) so the break doesn't stutter.
  • Lesson recording on Pro; cloud recordings on Platinum. Records the shared canvas alongside video — the parent sees the drill sequence, not just the tutor's face. Consent, storage, and sharing rules covered in how do I record online tutoring lessons?.
  • Browser-only, no install for the family. The student clicks your lesson link and lands in the classroom. No download, no account setup for the child. Works on the family's existing laptop / iPad / Chromebook. This matters because SpLD families are usually already managing more than the average — one less tool to install is one less friction to lose the family over.
  • Auto-generated class notes (Platinum). If the parent recap is the part you skip on a busy week, Platinum drafts a summary after each lesson which you edit and send in a minute or two. Consistent recaps are one of the biggest retention levers for SpLD families — see how do I keep parents renewing month after month?.

One private tutor described the outcome this way: "It has allowed me to set up a thriving online SpLD practice, now with a waiting list." The point is not that the platform is doing the teaching — it isn't; the tutor is. The point is that the delivery finally holds up online well enough for a specialist practice to run at scale.

Honest limits — what Koala Go doesn't do (and what else you'll want in your stack)

Frank about the gaps, because SpLD work runs long-term and small mismatches compound:

  • iPad experience is rougher than desktop. Koala Go runs in an iPad browser, and many students use it that way, but the pen precision and drag-and-drop feel are best on a Mac / Windows laptop with a mouse or a graphics tablet. If your student is doing letter formation on a first-generation iPad without a stylus, expect it to be workable but not great.
  • Stability on unstable connections. Video and shared-canvas sync do occasionally hiccup — a real-time collaborative environment is more sensitive to a bad Wi-Fi moment than a plain video call is. Families with underpowered internet will notice this; a wired connection where possible on the tutor side (Ethernet beats Wi-Fi for reliability) reduces it.
  • Diagnostic and progress-tracking tools are not built in. Koala Go is a lesson-delivery classroom, not an intervention-tracking system. If your program requires you to log detailed decoding-accuracy data per session or generate structured-literacy progress reports, you'll continue to use whatever tracking system you use today alongside Koala. We ship class notes, not clinical intervention records.
  • No included curriculum. We do not ship an Orton-Gillingham / Wilson / Barton / IMSE curriculum. You bring your own program; Koala Go is the delivery surface.
  • Playground gaps. Requested features that specifically help SpLD workflow — customisable timers on drill segments, a group-select on activity objects, more finely-grained syllable/phoneme token libraries — are still on the roadmap rather than shipped. If any of these is a hard requirement, write to koala@teachwithkoala.com before you commit.

A short decision rule for whether to move an SpLD practice online

  1. Are the families you'd serve reachable geographically only online? If yes — you're the only trained OG / Wilson / Barton tutor within a two-hour drive of a family that needs you — moving online is the intervention, not an alternative to it. Set up the tooling and ship. The families gain access they couldn't otherwise have.
  2. Can your current or intended platform reliably do drag-and-drop tokens both sides can manipulate, and bring your existing structured-literacy web resources into the room? If yes, the pedagogy translates. If no — if the tool is a video call with a whiteboard on top — the multisensory delivery breaks.
  3. Is your target student population one where engagement mechanics help? Under-12 dyslexic learners almost always; older intervention students usually less so, and often outright want no cosmetic layer. Pick a platform whose mechanics you can turn up for the young and down for the older.
  4. Are you willing to hold the parent-communication cadence that makes the intervention retain? Short recap + occasional clipped recording, every session, for months. If you're not, the retention lever isn't the platform — it's the routine you build around the platform.

If you'd like to try Koala Go specifically for a structured-literacy lesson, the whiteboard, Gems, Playground, and cobrowser mechanics are on the Free tier — you can run a real 45-minute session with your candidate student on their real device before deciding. Open Koala Go at classroom.teachwithkoala.com, and if you want to talk through your specific program or student population before you commit, write to koala@teachwithkoala.com with a sentence about the method you use and we'll give you our honest read.

Related answers

More answers on this topic