Whether you’re just starting out in your online tutoring career or you’re an “old pro,” you want to make the best possible impression on your new students. Train the Brain has some tools that you might find helpful as you navigate the technical side of online tutoring.
As you search for the tools that will work best for you and your students, take into consideration a few important areas:
- • Learning objectives – What does the student need help with? How can this tool help them achieve their goals?
- • Student’s learning style – Once you get to know the student a bit, what is their learning style? Do they seem to learn better with visuals, or do they respond better to oral or written instructions?
- • Your experience level – If you’re just starting out as a tutor, you might want to select your tools through that lens first. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself! But once you’ve gotten comfortable with your role, you can slowly add some tools to take your expertise to the next level.
A Quality Headset
First and foremost, you might want to invest in a quality headset to make sure that every word is clear for your students. With a reliable headset, you won’t be spending half of your tutoring session repeating yourself. When students come to a tutor for help, they are usually already frustrated, so making sure you can be heard is an important first step when you start as an online tutor.
The basic form of Common Curriculum is always free, so you can plan lessons for your students, upload files, print or download your plans, or share them with your students. If you’ve developed a strong relationship with a student and have plans to tutor them once or twice a week, then this tool will help you stay organized and focused on your lesson objectives. Once you’ve made some lesson plans, you can even reuse or modify them for working with other students struggling with the same concepts.
•Jing
This free screenshot and screen recording app can help you share important close-up information with your students. Whether you’re integrating a clear diagram, map, or image from their homework assignment, with Jing, you can communicate visually with students to help them understand even better.
Either online or through the app, Canva is a wonderful tool to help you create a bank of resources for your students. If you find yourself re-teaching the same scientific principal or multi-step math or writing process to different students, you can make visually pleasing printable or digital handouts for them that you can both use over and over again.
Quizlet’s been around for a long time now, but it still holds up as a terrific – and free – way to create flashcards and games for reviewing with students either online or through the app. Because you can share the link to each set of flashcards so that students can use them to review, this is another convenient way to bank sets of helpful terms and concepts to use repeatedly throughout your tutoring experience. You can easily copy sets and fine-tune them for each new student, sharing the unique link with each client as well.
If you plan to help students with writing assignments, this site helps you identify plagiarism in students’ writing. As a trusted tutor, you are the student’s first line of defense when it comes to their grades, so it’s important to help them make sure that the work they’re submitting is original. This site gives you the opportunity to teach them the fine arts of paraphrasing, source citation, and academic integrity. Since most schools run their students’ written work through plagiarism software, this is an efficient way to be sure the work they are doing is their own.
An effective tutor can change the academic direction of a student’s life. You hold a great responsibility, but you also have the opportunity to relieve the pressure that your students are feeling and provide them with the confidence they need to succeed. Explore these options and see how they can help you make a difference in your students’ lives.
