Setting up your account, filling your classroom, and running a lesson without surprises.
On the home page choose I want to teach Arabic. Enter your real name — it is what your students and the directory will show — then your email and a password, and confirm your address from the email we send.
Teacher accounts are reviewed by a human before the classroom opens. It is a short check that keeps the directory trustworthy; we write to you as soon as it is done.
Everything except opening a live room. The best use of that time is your profile — a complete one is what students actually read before they write to you.
You have one permanent 6-character room code. The link never changes, so you can give it to a student once and reuse it for every lesson, or paste it in your own calendar invitations.
Nobody can enter without you: everyone waits outside until you admit them, one by one.
Your sidebar has every page on a computer. On a phone the bar at the bottom has five tabs and everything else sits behind More.
Two worth knowing, because students end up waiting on them:
On the Students page create an invite code — 8 characters, valid once. Send it to your student; she enters it under More → My teachers and you are linked.
From that moment you can message her, schedule lessons with her and keep her lesson balance.
Confirm your email first. Nothing can be published until you do — click the link in the message we sent when you signed up. If it never arrived, the banner has a Resend button.
Fill your profile in Settings: a photo of your face, a bio of at least 100 characters, the languages you teach, and your specialisation. Write the bio in the language your students will search in — if you teach beginners abroad, English or Spanish reaches more of them than Arabic.
Then switch it to Public. It stays Private until all four are filled in and your account is approved. Once public you appear in the directory and students can write to you.
Publish your public profile from Settings → Public profile. Before it can go live it needs:
The directory is open on the free plan. Students who find you there arrive as an inquiry in Messages — they are not linked to you until you reply and agree to work together.
Free: 3 students, 1 course, 10 lessons a month, 5 notebooks.
Pro: 10 students, 10 courses, 100 lessons a month, 20 notebooks, and a much larger daily allowance for translation and tashkeel.
Sharing and annotating PDFs, saving corrected pages and the public profile are included on both.
Open Schedule, pick the student and the time. You both get an email immediately, and a reminder 15 minutes before it starts.
Everyone sees the time in their own timezone, so you do not have to calculate anything for a student in another country.
Students can propose slots that suit them; the proposals wait on your Schedule page with a badge, and you accept the one that works. Nothing is booked until you accept.
More than 24 hours before the lesson, either of you can cancel and a reason is optional.
Under 24 hours, you can still cancel but a reason is required and the cancellation is marked as late. A student cannot cancel at that point — she is told to message you, so a last-minute change is always a conversation rather than a silent no-show.
You can open your room at any moment and teach — nothing needs to be scheduled. Note that an unscheduled lesson does not touch anyone's lesson balance; only lessons you booked in advance count against credit.
Students who arrive appear in your waiting list; admit each one. If someone's connection drops she comes straight back in without asking again.
You can keep up to 4 tabs open at once — for example the lesson notebook, a book you are reading together, and a student's homework photo — and switch between them. Everyone follows the tab you are on.
Add a tab, upload the PDF, and it opens for the whole class. You choose the page everyone is looking at; if the file has a table of contents you can jump straight to a chapter.
Zoom is personal. Each student magnifies the page on her own screen as much as she needs — on a phone that matters a great deal — without moving anyone else's view. You always keep control of the page.
Everything you write appears on your students' screens as you write it.
The grey 🖼️ Uploads off button in the bar at the top is the switch: press it when you want to see someone's exercise and it turns green, reading Uploads on. A student's photo arrives as a new tab, straight-up and ready to correct — you write on it exactly like any other page.
Switch it off again afterwards. It is off by default, on purpose: nobody can drop pictures into your lesson unless you asked for them.
Press 💾 Save in the toolbar on the page you have just corrected. The page is flattened as you left it — her work with your corrections on top — and a copy goes to your library and to the library of every student in the room at that moment.
She finds it under Lesson materials and keeps it after the lesson ends. Save at the moment the page is finished: once the lesson is over, the annotations are gone.
Press End session when you are done. Notebooks are saved, attendance is recorded, and if the lesson was booked in advance it is marked as completed and one lesson is deducted from the balance of each student who attended.
Your students pay you, however you already prefer — bank transfer, Wise, PayPal, cash. QalamChat never touches the money and takes no commission.
In Settings you write how you want to be paid and your rate; students see it next to your name. Those fields are text we display, nothing more.
For each student you keep a simple ledger: add the lessons she has paid for, and attending a booked lesson subtracts one. The balance is always the sum of that history, so it cannot drift.
If a lesson falls through, your student can ask you to add a replacement to her balance. You decide — nothing changes until you do.
She is not charged automatically for a lesson she missed: a credit is only ever spent by attending one. So this is not a refund, it is you agreeing to add one.
A student can tell you she has paid. The claim waits on your Payments page until you confirm or reject it — only your confirmation changes the balance, never her claim on its own.
Ask her to reload the page — she returns to the lesson without being admitted again. If she had left the page open for a long time her session may simply have expired, and reloading sends her to sign in.
That normally means the site was updated while you were teaching. Open the room again and admit your students; your notebooks are safe. If it happens during a lesson, it is worth writing to us with the time it occurred.
The EN · ES · AR buttons at the top of any page change the interface and your emails. Each of your students sees the site in her own language, whichever you choose.
Write to us from the contact page. Tell us the day and time and what you were doing — with a live lesson that is usually enough for us to find it in the logs.