With the school year off and running, I thought this article was well timed, offering knowledge and resources many readers and web searchers would be looking for. Thanks to guest writer Mike Treidl from Tutor Bungalow for sharing his experienced insights into today’s tutoring field.

The tutoring industry has grown rapidly over the last several years as a result of increased academic competition and a struggling educational system.  With this rapid growth has come a myriad of tutoring options that can at times be overwhelming for someone not familiar with the industry.  Below is a breakdown of the different options, with pros and cons: 

On Campus Tutoring
Often the best choice because of its convenient location and affordable pricing, on campus tutoring is unfortunately not offered by every school.  When it is available it should be sought out as the first option.  The advantages are convenient location and often free tutoring. The drawbacks are limited resources and occasionally lax standards in tutors.

Brick and Mortar Tutoring
“Brick and Mortar” refers to the fact that tutoring is held at a physical building.  This style of tutoring is what comes to mind for most parents and students when they think of tutoring, and is used by many big names such as Sylvan Learning Center and Kaplan.  Often these companies are easy to find because they spend a lot of money on advertising. 

You can utilize resources like Yelp (search for “tutoring”), or a student’s guidance counselor to find a good “brick and mortar” tutoring company in your area.  The advantages, especially with established companies, are high quality materials, expert instructors, and potential cost savings if enrolled in a class.  The downsides are the cost of travel and gas, the extra expense for one-on-one tutoring, and the possible trouble focusing in a classroom-like setting.  Also, students may be forced to learn from the company’s materials rather than from their own homework.

In-Home and Private Tutoring
Typically associated with the wealthy or elite, private in-home tutoring is becoming more affordable with help from the Internet.  In this scenario the tutor comes to the student and tutoring is held in the home or at a nearby public location.  Finding private tutors directly can be difficult, as individual tutors do not have the resources to advertise themselves.  When word-of-mouth fails to deliver, Craigslist can be a one way to connect with individual tutors directly.  However, because anyone can post on Craigslist, the student or parent should be very discerning with who they hire. 

Instead of hiring a tutor directly, a student can use a company to match them with an in-home tutor.  Often the quality of the tutor will be directly related to the quality of the company.  A quick Google search can provide a list of tutoring companies and reviews.  Some nationwide chains are Club Z tutoring, A to Z Tutoring, and WyzAnt.  The advantages with private in-home tutoring are no travel requirement, customized lesson plans, one-on-one attention and potentially relatively inexpensive tutoring.  Disadvantages are no pre-defined lesson plan or materials and the challenge of finding a quality tutor.

Online Tutoring
This is the most recent development in tutoring and has helped to make after school education even more affordable.  Typically a medium such as Skype, or comparable software, is utilized to connect the student and tutor.  This will require students to have a computer, a web cam, and internet connection.  As with in-home tutoring, students can connect with tutors directly (saving money but requiring more effort) or use a company such as Tutor Vista. 

The advantages of online tutoring are lack of travel, customized lesson plans, one-on-one attention, potentially very inexpensive tutoring, and no physical contact between student and tutor.  The disadvantages are communicating over the internet, possibly dealing with a slow internet connection, and the challenge of establishing a strong relationship with the tutor in this situation.

The most important aspects to look for in a tutor are an ability to communicate, a personality that works well with the student, and a mastery of the material at hand.  A certain level of due diligence must be performed by the student (and/or the parents, when seeking tutors for their childrenn), to ensure that they get a great tutor.

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Have you used the services of this growing international partnership-based online provider?

I sat down last night to think about what my Wednesday post was going to be about. As soon as I sat down, a commercial came on TV for K12.com, a provider of ”online public school” for grades K to 12. It wasn’t immediately clear what facts support the “largest” claim, but they certainly appear to be doing this on a national and international scale. I just had to check them out further.

Their home page says that they provide “individualized learning customized to each child’s needs”, using an award-winning curriculum that engages students with a rich combination of online interactive and offline hands-on learning. I clicked on Find a School and then on my state, NY, and learned that they don’t have offerings here yet (my understanding is that we’re one a small number of remaining states that don’t permit online education at the K-12 level yet, but they didn’t mention that). They are partnered with 28 states and 38 countries. This page explains the different types of partnerships they have - public, private, and “blended” learning formats. Their course offerings are grouped into K – 8, High School, and Summer School, and they also offer Supplemental Education.

I was quickly impresssed with the breadth and inclusiveness of the offerings, with their passion, and with the richness of their web site. Don’t just take my word for it, click on over to K12.com and learn some more if this interests you like it did me! They also have a subsite designed specifically for educational administrators.

If you’re already aware of these folks and have anything you can share with us about your impression or your experiences with them, we’d love to hear more about it (click here to comment)!

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Are adaptive learning based “teaching machines” a perfect partnering of technology and education?

The idea of tutorial computer applications that adapt to a student’s learning curve strikes me as an idea with a lot of potential. It’s no coincidence that the ability to enable students to learn and proceed at their own pace is also a key benefit of the work of the Khan Academy which we examined briefly in Sunday’s post – there’s a theme developing here! The creation and delivery of self-paced learning tools is clearly a huge area of potential for education technology, and adaptive learning functionality can multiply the effectiveness of these types of applications.

According to this recent article from The Chronicle, B.F. Skinner created the original adaptive learning teaching machine back in the 50′s while working at Harvard. Wikipedia’s definition of Adaptive Learning explains that in this model, “computers adapt the presentation of educational material according to students’ weaknesses, as indicated by their responses to questions. Adaptive learning systems endeavor to transform the learner from passive receptor of information to collaborator in the educational process”.

“No two students are alike, but most are taught the same material in the same way. That’s about to change.”
- Application software company Knewton, Inc. 

Knewton is a player in the Adaptive Learning sphere, and they claim to be developing the industry’s “most powerful adaptive learning engine” with “continuous adaptivity— the ability to customize educational content to meet the needs of each student on a daily basis”. While traditional classrooms and textbooks can provide the same material to every student, Knewton is intended to dynamically match lessons, videos, and practice problems to each student’s ideal learning arc.

The Adaptive eLearning Research Group at the The University of New South Wales at Sydney, Australia also builds “technology for creating educational content that understands what students know and what they don’t and then intelligently adapt to them.” Learn more about this here. But first, check out their video:

So what do you think about Adaptive Learning applications? Anyone have any experience with tools like these, or know of any other exciting developments under way in this field? Click here and to share your insights!

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Salman Khan is an inspiring education technology leader on a mission.

If your interested in “ed tech”, you’ve probably already heard of him. I first wrote about Salman Khan work in this post in March of last year, and he has continued to experience growing success since, including a major nod from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Sal Khan is a pioneer in the education technology field and he is changing people’s thinking about some aspects of education. 

The Khan Academy

Khan’s rise to the spotlight revolves around his wonderful work establishing and evolving the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy provides over 2000 video lectures on a wide array of academic topics, at pretty much all learning levels, and it’s self-paced offerings are being viewed by a million viewers a month!

In the TED Talk below, Khan does an entertaining job of explaining the genesis of his work, the many advantages of this format, and the impact it’s had on so many people. This is an inspiring video. I don’t find the time to watch many of these, but I have to say that I really enjoyed this one.

“I started getting letters from teachers … saying we’ve used your videos to flip the classroom. You’ve given the lectures, so what we do now is … assign the lectures for homework, and what used to be homework I now have the students doing in the classroom”.

As Khan notes, this application of technology is actually humanizing the classroom.

Students can consume the lecture materials on their own time, in a more comfortable environment, with a flexible format that allows for easy replays (a nice improvement over being embarrassed to ask to revisit a topic in class when students struggle to keep up). Then, when students do homework in class with the teacher available and peers assisting each other, there much less likely to end up “stuck” on a problem that they’re having trouble with – the help is right there. There are so many reasons why flipping the conventional model on it’s head can work so well. (This is increasingly becoming a key element in my own personal thinking about how to best leverage education technology).

The model Khan demonstrates from the Los Altos school district’s project trialing the use of Khan Academy lectures in their math curriculum is fascinating (this can be found around 12 minutes in on the video). Kids are learning the materials, in their properly sized, well organized video modules, at their own pace. Teachers can review progress in a straightforward format using an onscreen visual grid, and then focus on helping those who need help, specficially where they need it most. This is elegant in it’s simplicity and effectiveness. Teachers can spend less time delivering the lecture materials and more time precision-focused on each student’s comprehension of the material.

We are so fortunate to have people like Salman Khan putting themselves out there like this. Khan cast aside a traditional, highly lucratrive career and started changing young people’s lives with his non-profit effort to change education, inspiring so many of us along the way. 

While recognizing and celebrating this innovative work, we also wish the very best of luck to Sal Khan and the Khan Academy(click here if you’d like to consider contributing to the Khan Academy - even with the Gates’ backing, they can still use donations to keep this effort on the right track).

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Can we harness the Internet and education technology to let kids teach other?

I was excited by this article, “Educational Technology Breakthrough: Let Kids Teach Each Other“, when I read it. “Kids would much rather watch other kids than adults. When kids produce award-winning videos that can be used in the classroom for free, the game will change, the effectiveness of education will improve and costs will decline.” There seems to be a wonderful aura of potential in this train of thought.

If you visit the Kids Teaching Kids website, you can read about the site’s vision. “The goal of KidsTeachingKids is to encourage student-produced video explanations of every problem in every textbook and make them freely and easily accessible to any student, anywhere in the world, with a web connection or cell phone.” Click here to learn more about “Why We Need It”, or here to read about ”What a Solution Looks Like”.

I think it would be pretty awesome if the lofty goals of this site could become a reality. I encourage teachers and educational administrators to stop by the site and/or read the article, and share this idea with others. Maybe, just maybe, this is an idea that can catch on and really evolve into a nice step forward for education.

“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” (John Lennon, Imagine, 1971).

 
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A handful of great sites to reference when students need a little extra help with these subjects.

Guest Post by Lisa Shoreland.

If you’ve ever struggled to find time to visit a teacher during office hours, drawn a blank at the library, or been confused about where to start on your homework, you’ve probably turned to online resources for additional help. And if you’ve been down that road, you know that for every great website, there are hundreds – even thousands – of inferior ones that can waste your time or give you the wrong information. Fortunately, there are several credible websites you can use to help with a wide variety of homework topics. Here are five of the best ones for common subjects that have caused plenty of homework headaches, so consult them whenever you need some direction or additional information in the world of academia.

English & Writing
Got a paper to write? Head over to The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) for some top-notch tips, examples, information, and strategies. You can find formatting and style guides, grammar and mechanics rules, writing tips, research guidelines, and much more – even ESL resources. In addition to reading about these helpful topics, you can try some exercises to figure out the correct way to do everything from paraphrasing to punctuation. This is a well organized website that provides reliable information, user-friendly navigation, and a wide variety of searchable topics, so be sure to take advantage of this excellent resource.

Foreign Language
WordReference.com is an incredibly helpful resource for any student who’s taking a foreign language course. You can accurately translate words and short phrases in a wide array of languages, giving you the ability to understand the connections among multiple languages – for example, you can translate an Italian word to French to Arabic to English. One of the most helpful tools on the site, however, is the verb conjugator, which can handle Spanish, French, and Italian. When you use this website, your days of paging through your limited textbook or printed dictionary to find a certain word or verb tense will be over. This can save you time, prevent plenty of frustration, and open up a wide variety of resources to help you explore foreign languages at your own pace.

Natural Sciences
Federal Resources for Educational Excellence provides a helpful webpage for everything from applied sciences to earth, physical, life, and even space sciences. This resource essentially serves as a database from which you can find more specific, credible websites to help you find what you need. For example, under Animal & Zoology resources, you can find the Smithsonian National Zoological Park page, Animal Diversity Web, and 32 other comprehensive resources that pertain to the same topic. Each site is federally approved, so you don’t have to worry about credibility – simply enjoy the accurate information and use it to help you succeed.

Social Sciences
Go to the Illinois State Board of Education’s Social Science Resources page for exceptional information on topics like genocide, civics, government, U.S. history, economics, geography, and more. Each website listed in this database leads you to credible information on a more specific topic, such as the American Revolution or a virtual tour of Eisenhower’s home. It’s a great way to explore or find a certain piece of information, so check it out the next time you’re scratching your head over social sciences.

Mathematics
This one is simple – just try math.com. You’ll find resources on every subject from basic math to calculus and advanced topics, where each section offers formulas and tables, references, test preparation and study tips, and a “cool tools” link. No matter what you might be struggling with, math.com can help you find the right answer.

Guest author Lisa Shoreland is currently a resident blogger at Go College, where recently she’s been researching military student grants as well as need based college grants. In her spare time, she enjoys creative writing, practicing martial arts, and taking weekend trips.

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College students share their tips about Internet resources that help them with their studies and school work.

Guest post by Alexis Pellegrino, Jarryed Scott, Berbely Zayas, Maritza Yuman, and Emran Rahim (all students currently attending The College of Westchester).

I came across this article last week in the “Student Voices” newsletter  published by the Student Government Association at the college where I work, and I knew it would be great to share here. (“Thank You!” to these students for their permission to do so).

Studying is the main ingredient in a college student’s everyday life, yet many fail to do so because of its tediousness. The Internet has become the most important tool for students looking to learn, study, or teach since it is available at their fingertips.  Throughout our research we have found a number of good tools that we recommend for these purposes. 

Both SparkNotes and Cliff Notes are good tools for literature because they provide chapter by chapter summaries and overviews of a wide variety of books.  Due to research, we recommend Spark Notes because they provide a larger selection of books and give more in depth overviews, which helps with studying for major tests.  Although we recommend this website, we do not believe it should be an alternative to reading, but only used as a study tool. Nothing is more thorough than actually reading the book yourself.

For students who need to view textbooks, Books 24/7 is highly recommended. It provides an Internet version of your textbook which can be accessed from anywhere. Unfortunately, Books 24/7 is only available for college students unless an outside source subscribes. 

- Click here to view the video blog post for this article -

Students looking to study or seeking help in certain subjects can go to StudyStack or GradeGuru for an online tutoring method.  Both sites provide notes and alternate ways of studying which makes it fun for the student to understand and review criteria.  We recommend StudyStack because it gives options such as flashcards, multiple games, and different languages which make studying easier.  When studying becomes interesting students are more likely to retain the information because they are enjoying the learning process.

For teaching purposes, we found GradeGuru and Google Docs to be the most helpful. Both sites give students access to notes and the ability to add/edit their own information or view another classmate’s work.  Google Docs also allows students to post or create presentations online that other student can also view or edit. Using the Google site gives teachers an opportunity to contribute or check on the progress of students work as well. 

From our research we came across many internet tools that will help students in the process of studying, teaching and learning.  If these tools are used properly, we believe they can become a great help to students and teachers.  All of the websites can be accessed from any computer and allow users to interact with each other while making the process more interesting by using different techniques and tools.

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Good writing skills are critical for today’s students, here’s a few online tools to help develop and reinforce them.

As teachers, I think we’d all agree that communication is pretty important. In fact, it’s a necessary component of education, livelihood, and basic functionality in our society. It’s also fairly obvious that there are two main ways to communicate, although more obscure forms exist. Basically, we talk and we write. That’s how we let other people know what’s going on, and it’s an important skill to have. Just about every student can talk, but how many can truly write well?

Why Students Need to Write Well
Writing is not for turning out cookie-cutter essays in AP Lit & Comp. It’s not for texting friends, keeping diaries, or even for getting a better SAT score. Writing is important because it’s used extensively in higher education and in the workplace. If students don’t know how to express themselves in writing, they won’t be able to communicate well with professors, employers, peers, or just about anyone else.

Much of professional communication is done in writing: proposals, memos, reports, applications, preliminary interviews, e-mails, and more are part of the daily life of a college student or successful graduate. Even if students manage to learn the material in their college classes without knowing how to write well, they won’t be able to express their knowledge to the people who are making the big decisions. Potential employers won’t know whether or not head knowledge can be applied to everyday demands unless it’s through a spoken interview. Even the majority of certifications and licensures require basic writing skills to obtain. The inability to write makes for a stillborn career.

Introducing Online Writing Tools
There are several different ways to help develop students’ writing skills, but implementing online tools is one of the best choices. This is due to many students’ inherent interest in all things technological – a lot of students have a fascination with any new tool that can simplify a basic task (like writing). If you’re interested in using online tools to help your students with their writing, the following list contains some useful ideas and websites.

Blogging: Let’s start with something simple: give your students a blog. You can have each student start his or her own page, or you can assign pairs, groups, or an entire classroom to one blog. This isn’t a fancy tool that will do part of the writing legwork for your students, but it’s a huge motivator and it’s fun. You might consider assigning blog topics, or you can have students research and propose their own “blog identities” before they start to write. The more you can get them invested in the idea of blogging, the more they’ll learn from the experience. Click here to learn more about getting started with free student blogging.

ReadWriteThink’s “Student Interactives”: Head over to this page at readwritethink.org for the handy Webbing Tool, Notetaker, Printing Press, and more. Many of the “Student Interactives” like these are useful, and they’re also indexed by grade level appropriateness. These types of tools can be a great interactive way to gain useful writing skills.

Model Bank: Introduce your students to Model Bank, a website with interactive versions of successful writing in common middle school and high school formats. For example, students can find a sample of a good poem analysis with notes in the margins and a printable “Writer’s Guide” to help implement the successful parts of the sample. The concept of “leading by example” does have merit in writing, and Model Bank is a great way to accomplish that.

These are just a few of the many types of free writing related tools and resources available on the web. Do you know of some other tools like this? Please comment and share!

Guest writer Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, researching areas of online colleges and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

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These online resources provide plenty of great ways for students to stay on top of their math skills, or to build on them, over the summer.

This is the kind of thing I really love about the Internet - easy to access and use sites and tools, many of which are free, focused on a specific need. The need in this case is the desire to keep student math skills from deteriorating over the summer months. These resources can also be leveraged to enable students to build on their skills sets and get ahead of the curve for the material they’ll be tackling in the fall.

Free Online Educational Game Sites
Most kids love playing online games – what a great way to entice your children to work on their math skills while having some fun! There are so many game sites on the ‘Net, and many of them are free. In this post last year, I provided links and information about 10 of these free site. Here’s a few games sites that have math-specific sections (each of these sites also has games covering different academic areas as well):

• Funbrain’s Math Arcade (Grades K through 8): This popular site from Pearson Education features 25 different math games, customized to your skills level (grade).
• FunSchool Kaboose Math Games (Pre-K through Grade 6): 33 Math Games here. Click on over and check out Action Fraction, Farm Addition, Fishing for Numbers, Monster Numbers, and more.
• Sheppard Software’s Math Games (Grades K through 8): A couple dozen games here, grouped into 8 sections including: Basic Operations, Fractions, Telling Time, and Pre-Algebra.

Free Online Video Tutoring
There seem to be countless free video tutorials on the Internet, for just about any subject you can think of – a quick Google Search will generate a slew of results to investigate. I hope I’ve saved you some time by providing these three sites that are all about education and are loaded with math tutorials:

• Free math tutorials from Brightstorm.com: Hundreds of well produced videos, delivered with a highly functional interface. Categories include: Algebra, Algebra 2, Calculus, Geometry, Pre-Calc, and Trigonometry.
• The Khan Academy (1000+ free tutorial videos): Salman Khan has earned engineering, computer science, and math degrees, and he could be pulling in a sweet salary from gainful employment in the corporate world, but instead he quit his day job in Sept 2009 to record educational videos for his self-started Kahn Academy. His non-profit organization has a mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere (I wrote this post in march about Mr. Khan’s impressive work). To view tutorial math videos, just scroll down the home page for a subject of interest – these include very advanced topics such as Linear Algebra and Differential Equations.
• WatchKnow’s Math Videos: There’s over 2500 math tutorial videos on this site, grouped into hundreds of subcategories, ranging from ”For Youngest Learners” to Calculus (86 Calculus videos). Learn more about Watchknow.org in this post, or just click through and check it out for yourself.

Online Math Help & Tutoring Resources
I wrote an article listing 15 Online Math Help and Tutoring Resources in December of 2009, including 9 paid resources and 6 free ones. If you’re willing to invest a little money in staying sharp this summer, click over to the article and check out the great sites listed there. For free help, here’s some of the free resources cited in the article:

• CliffNotes.com: The Cliff Notes web site provides free study help in many math areas, including advanced topics.
• Coolmath.com: This colorful site provides lessons for arithmetic, pre-algebra, and algebra.
• Math.com: There really is a Math.com? Yes, there is. This site provides some free practice and review resources. They have a lot of ads, but that’s often the “price” of free.
• Onlinemathlearning.com: This site provides helpful explanations and illustrations of math concepts in a wide range of math subjects. Some of their help pages include instructional videos.
• Webmath.com: This site allows you to enter equations and have it solve them and show you the solution! The automated problem solver may include some irrelevant information, but the sophistication of the site, at no charge, is pretty cool. The site covers a wide range of math subjects. I used it with some of my son’s 7th grade algebra homework, and it was spot on.

These new summer programs bring an Online Education twist to “summer bridge” programs.

I recently learned about these relatively inexpensive online summer math programs, to help students refresh and practice their math skills over the summer. Definitely an interesting alternative to the summer bridge books my kids have used. Will some students be more engaged with the material if it is online and interactive? 

TenMarks summer programs look like a great way for students to stay on top of math during the summer and avoid the “summer slide”. Students practice one topic at a time with interactive worksheets. Video lessons are available for help when needed. 

The workshops cost $39.99 for the entire summer. You can choose from: 

Step-up programs – “Get ready for the next school year by reviewing and practicing math concepts from the last school year – and previewing the next years.” 

Foundation programs – “Refresh core concepts like Algebra, Geometry, Fractions, Math Operations and more – ideal for introductory and advanced learners.” 

Custom program – “Create your own personalized summer program based on an Assessment.” 

You know the drill here on EmergingEdTech – if you have any experience with this topic and want to share, we’d love to hear it. Educators – do you know anyone who has used similar “summer help” programs? Have they worked well? Parents - is this something you think is worth trying? Have any of your kids tried any similar approaches, and if so, do you think they were worth the price of admission? We’d love to hear from you.