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2/25/2020 0 Comments What Can You Learn From the Best Maths Tutors When it Comes to Online Tutoring? by Dr Scott R. Dempsey on 22nd January, 2020CategoriesAll Student Related Teaching Tips Tutor Doctor Values Are you a tutor or student who currently uses online tutoring? Perhaps you currently have lessons in-person but are looking to move online? Maybe you teach maths and are seeking a wider platform to share your skills and passion for the subject? Well, to help you get started, or really ramp-up your online tutoring efforts we asked 60 of our top tutors (who between them delivered over 6,000 hours of online tutoring just last year) to share some of their top tips. We asked them to be subject specific, so we could give you better insights into how online tutoring might be adapted for different subjects. Given that 75% of those tutors teach maths, we thought that would be a good place to start. Furthermore, maths is a core subject at GCSE and the most popular subject at A-level with over 90,000 students sitting the exam in 2019. The majority of our top tutors have been tutoring for 2-4 years and are a mixture of full-time and part-time tutors ranging from university students to retired teachers. Almost unanimously, they have seen an increase in the proportion of students they tutor online as opposed to offline. This is a trend that is only likely to continue - so there has never been a better time to learn more about teaching online. “I now tutor all my students online, which has evolved dramatically from an offline only basis just 3 years ago. I am thoroughly happy with the change and my students are as well.” Owen (Maths and English tutor, 160 hours on Bramble last year) “I'm 100% online now, but a year ago it was 1 online to 5 offline. I recently dropped all my offline students because I moved to a new area, but was able to continue with my online student. Interestingly, my online student used to be offline until his family moved. We've been able to continue our relationship because of Bramble!” Stephen (Maths, Science & Languages tutor, 64 hours on Bramble last year) Top Tips for Tutoring Maths OnlineTutoring online requires a slightly different approach to tutoring offline. Many tutors spoke of the importance of frequently checking understanding with the student when teaching online. They talked about doing this verbally by simply asking but also about the importance of getting students to complete work on the whiteboard. Online tutoring offers a great opportunity to ensure the student is more actively engaged: drawing figures on the whiteboard or solving exam questions. Tutors also mentioned that their students often feel more comfortable working through problems online as they are able to think things through without someone looking over their shoulder. This gives students space to check their understanding throughout the lesson. The fact the student are also able to work from the environment they feel most comfortable in only helps to put them more at ease. One of the more obvious advantages of tutoring online is access to large pools of resources. Using Bramble, there are no fewer than 5 ways to upload resources into a session and almost all of our top tutors mentioned resources as an important part of being successful online. “I often want to point things out on the whiteboard, so I circle and underline a lot of things on the board and draw arrows to things as I am explaining. I take screenshots of past exam papers and put them on the board and have the student answer them as if they were in a real exam, typing or writing in the answer field. Make use of the different colours, they'll make the notes more stimulating for students when reviewing.” Laetitia (Maths and Chemistry tutor, 52 hours on Bramble last year) “It is quite useful to upload pictures of the diagrams and annotate them as you go along, that way they can serve as notes for students to review later! For maths, I often add pictures of the questions we're working on and have the working out on the side so that it can be easier for the student to refer to it again.” Sam (Maths, Economics & Biology tutor, 286 hours on Bramble last year). To summarise, here are the top four tips from all of the maths tutors we surveyed:
A great example of student-tutor collaboration on a geometry exam question which was imported through drag-and-drop. In this example, the student was using an iPad and Chromebook and the tutor a PC with iPad Pro and Apple pencil. In this example the student is working on a probability question with occasional direction and reassurance from the tutor. No resources this time as the tutor and student work through a binomial expansion. Why Maths is the Perfect Subject for Online TutoringMaths is extremely well suited to being taught online. There is a huge amount of problem-solving and most of the revision involves working through papers and questions. This lends itself nicely to the online model, because it’s very simple to upload the resource you need and for all the work to be done by the student next to the questions.
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