What teaching materials work best for online ESL lessons?

A working independent online ESL tutor's toolkit:

• Digital flashcards. Searchable, reusable, easy to share. Quizlet, Anki, or flashcards built into your classroom tool.
• Slide decks. One concept per slide, big visuals, minimal text. Reuse across students at the same level.
• Annotation and shared drawing. Lets the student point, circle, draw on the same canvas as you. Indispensable for phonics, letter formation, and grammar.
• Realia (real physical objects). Hold up an actual apple when teaching "apple." For learners under 6, a real object on camera lands faster than a slide.
• A visible reward system. Stickers on a chart, points toward a goal, a "monster" that grows with each lesson.
• A shared whiteboard or canvas. For spontaneous drawing, modeling letters, playing tic-tac-toe with vocabulary, or improvising when the lesson plan falls flat.
• A small library of songs and short videos (Super Simple Songs, Maple Leaf Learning, and similar) for energy breaks.

Avoid materials designed only for in-person classrooms (paper worksheets meant to be filled in with a pencil) unless you have a clean workflow to share and annotate them digitally.