Small Group Online Math tutoring allows two or three students to have tutoring at one time. This way, you can economize by splitting the cost between multiple students’ families.
In some cases, small group tutoring is preferable, especially if your student is motivated by having a classmate participate. Sometimes, students are a little shy about starting individual online tutoring. The energy of another student can help your student overcome their shyness.
Furthermore, knowing someone else is struggling with the material can make us feel less alone in our struggles. So often as learners, we don’t want to admit any difficulty comprehending new material. As such, we don’t want to ask questions. Or, we criticize ourselves for not understanding the material immediately.
These harmful myths can be dispelled by having 2 or 3 students tutoring simultaneously. Most of the time, our peers have just the same questions. Small group online math tutoring can help your student overcome their inhibitions present in a larger-classroom atmosphere. In a smaller group setting, your student will feel much more comfortable with their questions and struggles.
What You Need for Small Group Online Math Tutoring
There are a few items to check to see if it would be a good fit for you:
For small group online math tutoring, you’ll need:
1: A touchscreen. A Chromebook touchscreen will work, as will an iPad. In fact, any touchscreen should work as long as you have a stylus.
2: A stylus. Having a stylus is important. You might think you don’t need a stylus, which is true. However, just as you’d prefer painting with a brush to painting with your fingers, you’d definitely prefer doing math with a stylus to doing math with your fingers. It will make your work neater and easier.
Your stylus needn’t be expensive nor fancy. When I started using iPads for tutoring, I thought the Apple Pencil was best. Then, one day when the charge for the Apple Pencil was running out during a student’s session, the student started using his own stylus. It worked just as precisely as the Apple Pencil without having to be charged. He showed me it was part of a 2-pack available from Amazon. Replaced my Apple pencil with it the next day.
You don’t even need that. Sometimes I’ve used a $5 stylus, the kind you can find in line while at Staples, or in the electronics department of Target or Wal-Mart. Basically, any stylus will do fine.
3: A Gmail account. This is so you can access your board. Most school emails are Gmail-compatible. So, if you have a school email, that will work fine. Any Gmail-compatible email will work to sync with your Ziteboard.
Be Patient with Ziteboard
Just be patient with logging into your Ziteboard. First, you’ll receive an invite via your Gmail account. Once you click it, you’ll receive an ask to join Ziteboard in a few ways: Facebook, Slack, Gmail, etc. Gmail is the one you want as it’s the easiest. Yet, it will take a minute or two for you to log in the first time. Please be patient. It should work, it just takes time for the Ziteboard to sync with your Gmail account the first time. After your first time, the sync is almost instant.
So, after your onboarding, you should be fine. From that moment on, your only problems should be your math questions. Together, we can handle those.
Testing Your Technology for Small Group Online Math Tutoring
You’ll want to schedule a free tech check session. You’ll only need about 10-15 minutes to make sure your technology works. By checking your technology, you can make sure that the tech part won’t be a cause of stress while you’re tutoring. Math can be hard enough. We needn’t add any stress to your math proess. Rather, we want to do what we can to reduce your stress of learning math.
P.S. You’ll have access to your specific Ziteboard for about a year. There’s no need to worry about whether it will be there for you during your school year. It will be there. You’ll be ok.
