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Current Events In Education

Where to Find Help With Math

Math has the odd distinction of being a neglected and disliked subject by many, despite it’s necessity and importance in day to day activities. Most topics in math are not too tough to handle and when students put in daily work, they find that the subject becomes much easier.
Studying with friends is a great idea that will motivate students to learn and enable them to help each other. Group study ensures that students spend regular time studying math. Students are able to share their doubts and queries better with peers. Working on the problems together and solving them will boost the group’s confidence in their math skills, while helping them learn how to work together as a team.
Printed guides and textbooks provide help to some extent. They are particularly useful for students who understand the theory of what they are doing and get stuck while working out the problems. The study guides have solved examples with steps which will help students get back on track.
Online Math Help & It’s Many Avatars
The internet is a great place to find math help. There are numerous websites dedicated to math and helping school and college students make sense of confusing equations, formulas and diagrams. The great thing about turning to the internet is that you have a hundreds of options and can usually find something customized to your needs.
Online math calculators are handy tools that calculate answers for the variables that you input. This is particularly useful when students need to check and see if their work is correct. Students can find answers to any type of math problems, from arithmetic to statistics to algebra. Algebra calculators are deigned specifically for algebra problems and can calculate with any number of terms.
There are a number of math resources which encourage students to practice and improve their problem solving skills like worksheets and quizzes. The worksheets can be printed out as well and worked on later. Most websites provide the answers to the questions as well. Math games and puzzles are also available online and make learning math a much more enjoyable experience by involving the whole family.
If you have a problem that needs answering pretty quick, try posting it on one of the math forums which feature live math experts, many of whom promise to deliver under an hour. Online tutorials are one of the best ways to get clarity on a specific topic.. you will find both written and video tutorials, both of which are effective and comprehensive.
Online math tutoring is a good choice for students who want a lot of help with the subject, their homework and assignments. You will find experienced and qualified tutors at reasonable rates and get help with math whenever you need it.…

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Current Events In Education

Why Tutoring Can Improve a Child’s Success

It would be difficult to find anybody that would argue that getting a good education is important. We make sure that our children get that education on a yearly basis all the way from kindergarten through high school. We may even follow through with that education by providing them with the best college courses that are open to us as well. Of course, there are many times when the little bit of extra attention is necessary, and this can be done by getting a tutor to help your child. Aside from the fact that they are going to get better grades, overall, there are other benefits to using a tutor that you may want to consider as well.
One of the problems that many parents have with the educational process is the fact that the teachers are so overwhelmed with busy classrooms. It is likely that those who have a need for help are going to be those that receive the most attention. Although that does not necessarily seem backward, it does leave those that are not necessarily looking for additional help to be self-taught, to a large extent. When you have a tutor available, they are going to help your child to focus, and the entire focus of the teaching is going to be on your child at the same time.
Another benefit of hiring a tutor is the fact that you can get specific help for your child. For example, consider the possibility that your child is doing fine with math and other classes but they may be lacking to a certain extent with their reading. It is possible for you to get a reading tutor that can assist them in pushing forward in that subject. Not only does it show benefit for most children who have such a specific personal teacher, it often helps them to improve by at least one grade level over the course of the summer.
If your child is also taking part in many extracurricular activities, hiring a tutor can also be beneficial because of the flexibility that is available. One option that you may want to consider if your child is very busy is hiring an online tutor that can assist him or her with their education. The Internet provides an easy way for the tutors to interact with the children, and in some cases, it will be as if they were sitting in the same room with those children. The benefit of using an online tutor is that the classes can be rescheduled very quickly, just in case something unexpected happens to come up in your life.
There are many options that are open to parents and children alike when it comes to hiring a tutor. By helping to improve the child’s education, you can assist them through their entire life, not only in the careers that are open to them but also by providing them with additional self-esteem. Be sure that you set up an appointment to speak to a tutor about what they can do for you and your child, as you might be surprised with the options that are open to you.…

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Education College

Preparing For the Lower Level ISEE

As a rule, test preparation is only as good as the materials used. True, a good teacher can make lessons interesting and can explain new or difficult concepts well. However, if the test preparation materials used do not accurately reflect a test, then there is no way for test preparation to be targeted and make efficient use of time.
The big, commercially important tests have a lot of prep materials available for them. Competition works to keep the overall quality high. With smaller tests taken by fewer students, the situation can be dramatically different. A good example is the lower level ISEE. This is hardly an obscure test, but it is taken by many, many fewer students than the SAT or even the upper level ISEE. It is easy to purchase lower level practice tests, but there aren’t very many of them and the quality is not nearly as good as the quality of materials written for tests with a larger market.
The lower level ISEE is taken by children currently in fourth and fifth grade (who are applying to fifth and sixth grade). A good example of the difference between the official practice test and most published tests can be illustrated by examining fractions. It is common, and appropriate, for children just starting fourth grade to know very little about fractions. Much of fourth grade math is spent teaching this topic. (Students finishing fourth grade should generally have a solid grounding in fractions, though they will usually not have learned how to multiply and divide fractions at that point.)
The official lower level ISEE exam reflects this reality. Fractions are an important part of the test, but most of the questions are about introductory topics such as naming fractions, ordering fractions, and estimating with fractions. Few questions involve fraction operations (i.e., addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) and those that do are relatively simple. This is in contrast to most commercially available practice tests. For instance, the lower level ISEE practice test published by Kaplan includes converting percents to fractions and places a significantly greater emphasis on fraction operations.
The difference in academic level between the Kaplan test and the official practice test is important, but not enormous. Unfortunately, the problem is exacerbated because the difference in tone is even greater than the difference in level. The Kaplan test has many fewer word problems and more plain calculation problems. Unfortunately, simply using a different brand of preparation materials is not an easy solution. The practice test published by Princeton Review, for example, has different problems than the Kaplan test, but the problems are of a similar caliber.
As with pretty much any standardized test, the most important preparation for the lower level ISEE occurs in the classroom, during lessons that are not actually aimed at test preparation. However more specialized test prep is often useful. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to waste time and effort on test prep if the materials used don’t mirror the real test accurately. For this reason parents seeking test preparation for the ISEE should be cautious when hiring tutors and avoid companies that rely on materials that are widely published. Hopefully, more accurate lower level ISEE preparation materials will be published soon.…

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Education Current Events

Techniques for Naming Your Tutoring Business

Business name parts
Small businesses or new businesses often have two parts to their business names. The first part can be described as the unique part and the second part is the descriptive portion. Some people try to use only a unique name for their business without a descriptive part. This is generally a bad idea for small businesses because without the descriptive portion people won’t know what services your business offers. Over time as your brand becomes well-known in your market you should be able to drop the descriptive portion of your name and people will still know what business you’re in.
The unique portion of a business name takes many forms. The following list contains several variations of the unique portion that are often used for tutoring business names.
Aspirational
Tutoring businesses often use words related to success, reaching goals, and succeeding since these are some of the reasons people hire tutors. Words like “Elite”, “Ivy”, “A+”, and so on are examples of aspirational words. Check the thesaurus for more ideas for your business. Words like these are great for a tutoring business name because people will begin to associate your business with success.
Geography – Tutoring companies often operate in specific geographic markets so including the name of your market in your company’s name is a good strategy. For example, you might name your company “Grand Rapids Tutoring” if your company is based in Grand Rapids. A name that includes your location is an effective way to communicate to people in your area that you offer tutoring for their area.
Unique Value
Many businesses have a unique value proposition – something that distinguishes them from their competitors. If your business offers some kind of unique value to customers you might want to include this in your business name. Examples include words like “Traveling”, “One-on-One”, or “Total Math”. Unique value propositions can be related to your method of teaching, grade level, subject you specialize in, etc.
Subject Specific
If your tutoring company specializes in a single subject you might want to create a unique name related to the subject in which you specialize. Unique names can include words in a foreign language you teach, terminology such as “Pi”, or names of influential figures in your subject such as “da Vinci”, “Pascal” or “Einstein”.
Personal Name
Using your own last name in the name of your tutoring business is another useful technique for naming your business. Many successful companies have used this naming technique (i.e. Kumon, Huntington Learning Centers in the United States, Kip McGrath in Australia. This technique can become even more effective if you are already well-known for your work in the education field.
The second part of your business name should be the descriptive portion. Including words such as tutoring, tutors, education, academy, learning, learning center, etc. The descriptive portion of your business name is what tells people what your company does. This is very important when your business is starting out since you want to begin establishing a link between the unique part of your business name and the descriptive portion in people’s minds.
Conclusion
The naming techniques above should help you generate several ideas. By creating different combinations of the unique and descriptive portions you can create even more name variations. Create a list of your top ideas and ask your friends or coworkers which ones they like the best and you’ll have a name that will help your business grow and establish a strong brand.…

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Education Current Events

Physics – A Subject Can Be Described by Logic or Magic

It is very easy to know and understand that every action (which has its own set of equal and opposite reaction) executed by man force or nature, in this world or beyond, is being carried out due to the presence of the power of science. It is when we grow up that we realize how our Utopian fairy tale world (which as children we knew was held by a herculean force) actually stands, rotates and revolves due to Physics. It seems very nice to think about Einstein sitting in the shade of a tree and discovering gravity or Watt looking at a pan in his kitchen and gifting the world what we call a steam engine. But all these miraculous inventions and discoveries start to seem impossible to decipher when they enter our Physics books and the spirits of those great men haunt us in sleep.
We often necessitate the need for extra guidance in the subject in concern beyond the reach of classroom studies and that is exactly the time when we can opt for experienced tutors according to our respective individual needs. The general theories of Physics include Electromagnetism (including Magnetism, Electricity etc.), Thermodynamics (including heat engine, Kinetic theory etc.), Theory of Relativity (including special and general relativity), Statistical mechanics, Classical mechanics (including Newton’s law of motion, Kinematics, Statics, Dynamics etc.) and Quantum mechanics (Schrodinger equation, Scattering theory etc.). Astrophysics, Chemical Physics, Atomic Physics, Biophysics, Classical Physics, Geophysics, Nuclear Physics, Molecular Physics and Condensed Matter Physics are the basic classifications that form the subject from the roots. A few other sub fields are Optics, Thermodynamics, Quantum and Particle.
Some fundamental ‘general concepts’ among the most sought after topics for tutoring Physics are Physical observation, quantity, experiment, theory, unit, state and system and the force of Gravity and some ‘theoretical concepts’ are Particle, Physical field, Wave, Physical constant, Physical law, Physical interaction and Mass energy equivalence. More and more proficient people are taking up tutoring as the source of income beside their mainstream profession. Professional teachers and professors also give out tuitions at home or tutorials. To get a grip of Physics, one of the most profound primitive institutions of academics, you can opt for tutors from the best teachers you know, or even get through with suitable tutors online.…

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Department Of Education Website

Pros and Cons of Online Tutoring

Internet infrastructure has developed to a point that it has become extremely easy and convenient to hire an online tutor. This option usually presents itself as a dilemma to parents looking to hire a tutor for their child. While it is easy to presume that live teaching can in no way match the experience of having the teacher physically present, the experience actually varies depending on the student’s age, his/her comfort with technology, the subject taught and the experience levels of the educator. Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of online tutoring in more detail.
PROS:
a) Online tutoring eliminates the need to travel for either the student or the educator. This not only saves time, but also money, making live coaching far more cost efficient.
b) Older students accustomed to Internet technologies will generally find online mentoring more comfortable than home coaching.
c) Evolution of software technologies has reached such a point that, an educator could write, dictate, speak or draw in real time while the student watches. The mentor too, is able to view the student’s work real time. This real time face-to-face interaction maintains a personal touch to teaching, while the distance assures the parents the safety of their kids.
d) Recording is possible when it comes to one-on-one lessons, this enables the student to visit back on any of the older lessons for more efficient revisions. These recordings can also provide a valuable insight to parents about the quality of the lessons provided.
e) Finally live tutoring provides a lot of flexibility with timings, content of the subject, quality of the teacher etc. Since distance is never an issue, a good instructor is easier to find.
CONS:
a) No matter how you look at it, live tutoring keeps the student physically away from the teacher, allowing for mischievous or unruly behaviour.
b) Lack of quality Internet access can severely hamper the quality of online teaching. Other than this, software compatibility issues, user experience in dealing with computers etc. can have a negative impact on the quality of education.
c) Students participating in such programs might simply email each other and chat online since distances involved make it impossible to physically meet. This might hamper social skills in young children.
As with most things, live coaching might be a good thing or a bad thing. It is up to you to gauge the personality of your child and the value of a given tutor, and decide if online is the way to go or not.…

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Education Current Events

Pricing Strategies for Private Tutors

Pricing plays an important role in the success of any tutoring business. However, there is a lot of confusion about the best way to price your tutoring services and how to go about finding the right price. This article looks at pricing strategies for independent tutors and tutoring companies and how to research prices in your market.
Setting your Pricing Level
The first step in determining how much you should charge for your tutoring services is to determine what other tutoring services in your area are charging. You’ll want to focus on tutoring companies that offer similar services to your own tutoring business since there can be a large variation in tutoring prices for different types of tutoring.
The next step is to do some research just like someone searching for tutoring would. Search for tutoring services in your area online, check the phone book, ask guidance counselors about other tutoring companies. When you have a list of similar tutoring companies in your area you can find out about prices by calling them up and asking or checking their website for prices. You can also check online tutoring directories to find out what independent tutors are charging for the subjects your company offers.
If your company is new and you or your tutors have average experience and credentials then you should try to price your services a bit above the average price.
If your company has been operating for a while, you have satisfied customers, and you or your tutors have teaching experience and credentials then you should price closer to the upper range of comparable tutoring services.
Many new tutoring companies think they need to start with low prices in order to attract clients, but this is a risky strategy and can actually hurt your business more than help it. The reason for this is that if your prices are very low, you will be generating very little profit to reinvest into promoting your business. If you are paying tutors to work for you, you will also have a difficult time attracting and keeping high quality tutors which are extremely important for building your reputation and creating satisfied customers who will refer you to other clients.
Early on it might make sense to focus on an under-served segment of the tutoring market in your area. This will allow you to charge higher rates, and generate higher profits which will help you afford more marketing and better tutors. These in turn will help you establish a base from which to expand into more competitive segments of the tutoring market.
Tutoring Price List
Providing different pricing options can also help your business meet the needs of more clients. There are several pricing or billing methods you can use.
Pay per Session
This pricing option has clients pay before or after each tutoring session. This is a good method if your business does not have much of an operating history. It also puts new clients at ease if they are new to your business and are wary of paying for a longer period of time in advance.
Pay per period
Paying per period may have clients pay for a week or month in advance based on the number of sessions they will have during that period. This method is good for tutoring businesses because you receive the money up front and don’t have to worry about students forgetting to pay for each session. It’s more convenient for clients because they can pay for a week or month and don’t have to worry about writing a check for every single session. Some tutoring companies may bill at the end of each week or month, but for new companies it’s best to require payment in advance since this will allow you to receive payment for tutoring sessions before you need to pay your tutors.
Prepaid Packages
Some tutoring companies sell prepaid bundles of tutoring services. Such as 10 hours of math tutoring or 12 hours of English tutoring. These hours can then be scheduled over the following months as the student schedules them. This method allows you to offer volume pricing which can encourage potential clients to commit to more tutoring sessions.
Adapting your Prices
The tutoring market is constantly changing so it’s important that you’re flexible with your tutoring company’s pricing. If your pricing structure is not helping you meet your business goals you simply need to try tweaking your prices or possibly your services. People are concerned with value so if you offer more value in your tutoring services you may not need to lower your prices or if you offer more value than you did a year ago then it might be a good idea to raise your prices.…