2 Responses

1. Christian Stapfer

   15|Dec|2010 1

   I have been using the combination of a tablet-pc, a pen-enabled shared whiteboard (of my own design), and skype for 3 years know (which means for hundreds of hours of one-on-one online math-tutoring) and can say: it works really, really well (for that purpose).
   Caveats: 1. my whiteboard needs to be installed (easy). 2. skype needs to be installed (easy: I have not encountered a student who could not do it). 3. The student needs to be running Windows XP, Vista or 7 on his pc (this somewhat limits the range of students that I might possibly tutor, that’s agreed). 4. The internet connection needs to be sufficiently fast and stable (not very fast, just fast i.e. broadband – mainly because of skype: my whiteboard only transmits about 1MB per hour during a typical tutoring session). This is now mostly the case in Western Europe, my experience seems to indicate. Don’t know about other parts of the world. 5. If the student wants to write on that whiteboard he would either need a tablet-pc (the ideal case) or have an external graphics tablet attached to his pc (this works, but is not ideal: i.e. handwriting feels not as natural and cannot be as closely spaced). It should be noted however, that some of my best students, i.e. the students who succeeded with the highest grade in their final exam, did have neither a tablet-pc nor an external tablet. They were just asking me questions and were apparently very carefully following my explanations and what I was writing on the whiteboard. Also, they did carefully print out what I had written. In those printouts my handwriting is as smooth, as readable and as closely spaced as if I had written directly on that printout with a sharp pencil or pen. – Maybe I should add that those successful students without tablet-pc or graphics tablet were all adults. 6. This is for one-on-one tutoring only. Tutoring an entire group of people is something different again. I have no experience doing that with these tools.
   I began tutoring online in 2002 and, therefore, have tried many different approaches over those past 8 years but, looking back, would not want to recommend anything other than what I am using now ;-)

   Regards,
   Christian

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2. ödev

   13|Jun|2011 2

   have been using the combination of a tablet-pc, a pen-enabled shared whiteboard (of my own design), and skype for 3 years know (which means for hundreds of hours of one-on-one online math-tutoring) and can say: it works really, really well (for that purpose)…

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