Train online like you train in person with these twelve devices

Some of the best tutors we know are moving their businesses online, and for good reason. Tutoring students online entirely eliminates the waste of spending your day traveling inbetween appointments, which can often eat up valuable tutoring hours.

And while tutoring online may be more efficient and convenient, it’s not without its challenges.

Not every subject transfers well from in-person to online: depending on the subjects you tutor, online tutoring may not yet be perfected. Until recently, it was almost unlikely to simulate the practice of freeform collaboration on a collective problem set online, as is common in math and science tutoring.

Forming an emotional connection can be challenging: when you begin training a fresh student, violating the ice with a fresh student can becoming challenging, as it’s more difficult to make an emotional connection without being present in the room.

Looking to step up your marketing? Click below to join the fantastic Lindsay Dow, of Lindsay Does Languages, for a free 5-part online teacher marketing course.

Holding the student’s attention: when screens are open and there’s no in-person supervision, there will undoubtedly be distracting windows open on your student’s screen.

The good news is, problems like these can be solved in a multitude of ways, from modifying your instructing treatment to using fresh devices and software that help you get the job done.

Let’s walk through the software setup we at Coach recommend for the online tutor’s toolbelt.

Movie talk

Coach’s Picks: Skype for 1-on-1 online tutoring sessions, Google Hangouts for group online tutoring sessions.

Both Skype and Google Hangouts (free for unlimited use, however Skype offers a premium plan for group calling) are mature products that work well and provide most of the same features: free 1–1 movie or voice calls, screen sharing, file sharing and talk.

With the launch of Google Hangouts On-Air, it’s now possible to schedule a free group session in advance, which will be recorded and available after the session for students to re-watch.

This is a fantastic implement for online group tutoring — in a 6-week course, it’s unlikely that every student will be able to make every session, but with Hangouts On-Air they won’t fall behind.

Virtual whiteboard

Coach’s Picks: Baiboard for 1–1 or group tutoring sessions if you have an iPad, Idroo if you’re on a Windows or Android tablet.

For subjects like science and math, it’s critical to simulate the practice of sitting next to a student, crowded around a single exercise on paper or in a book.

When the only implements at our disposition were the keyboard and mouse, this was indeed rough — there’s nothing clunkier than attempting to scribble math notation on a problem set with a mouse.

With the introduction of the iPad (and other tablets) and a host of networked whiteboarding apps, everything switched. The best whiteboarding apps on the market please a few conditions:

• Real-time: You and the student are looking at the same document, with a minimal network lag time.
• Simultaneous: Numerous people can edit the document at the same time.
• Pliable canvas: Permits you to upload any document to be used as the background for the lesson.
• Persistent: Whiteboard sessions are stored, so that either you or the student can review the lesson afterwards (or you can share with another student or tutor).

There are five apps on the market that sate these conditions, and are mature enough products to be trusted in tutoring sessions:

• Idroo (free for limited use, €10 a month for unlimited use) provides all of the features listed above, with a slick drag-and-drop interface for adding pics to your instructing canvas. It’s also compatible with Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS and Android, so you can make use of it without an iPad. Our one issue with Idroo is the free plan only permits you to upload the very first two pages of a document for use in the canvas, making it of limited use for utter lessons.
• Baiboard (free for unlimited use) is fantastic for conducting group sessions, as it can accommodate up to forty participants on the same board at once. It also offers iPad-to-browser sharing, so that students can participate from anywhere.
• Groupboard (free for one whiteboard, $9.99/month up to $499/one-time for more whiteboards) provides most of the same features as Idroo and Baiboard, but with a few key limitations: the free plan tops out at five users on one whiteboard, and background pictures must be image-formatted (vs PDF). Lack of PDF compatibility is a dealbreaker for many tutors — but if you’re partial to Google Hangouts and don’t need PDFs, Groupboard offers a slick integration that embeds a board into your Hangout session.
• WizIQ ($16 — $1,000+/month depending on number of whiteboards / students needed) is a full-fledged e-learning platform, which has an accompanying virtual classroom app. While it includes all of the key features mentioned above, it also integrates with Learning Management Systems like Moodle and Blackboard. If you’re running an online school with a long-term student base (vs conducting tutoring sessions), then WizIQ is for you.
• Scribblar ($14-$39 depending on number of ‘rooms’) is unique in that it permits you to integrate an online whiteboard directly into your own website, versus using the whiteboard on Scribblar’s own site. Leyla Norman of Empower English Tutoring likes using it because of the persistent nature of Scribblar classrooms, which permit students to refer back to sessions and keep track of work week-to-week.

Document collaboration

Coach’s Pick: Google Docs, enough said. Simply the best online document collaboration contraption for tutoring.

There’s only one king of the Online Collective Document Jungle. Google Docs is free for unlimited use.

Screen recording

Coach’s Picks: Camtasia and Screencast-O-Matic for screen recording, Animoto for movie editing, YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

Many tutors find it useful to record sessions with students, so that the student can review the lesson later on. It’s also a excellent way to self-critique your own instructing methods, and make improvements.

If you’re planning to develop an online course at some point, screen recording can be used to seed content and lessons. Just think about how many courses you’d already have ready if you’d recorded every one of your tutoring sessions.

There are a few necessary, complementary instruments in the online tutors movie recording toolbelt:

• Screen recording:Camtasia ($99 for Mac, $299 for PC) and Screencast-O-Matic (free for fifteen minutes or less, $15/year for unlimited) both suggest easy-to-use screen recording contraptions for Windows and Mac, which permit you to produce beautiful movies with a minimal learning curve. Camtasia has a more advanced movie editor, and also offers mobile recording for Mac (by connecting your tablet or phone to your Mac with a lightning cable). The choice inbetween them indeed comes down to how you’re using screen recordings — if you’re building an online course, we’d recommend Camtasia, but if you’re recording student sessions to save for them, we’d recommend Screencast-O-Matic.
• Movie editing: Both Camtasia and the pro version of Screen-o-Matic come with movie editing implements built-in. But if you’re looking for a standalone editing implement (and don’t want to opt for a professional contraption like Final Cut Pro), we’d recommend Animoto ($8/month). It permits you to add music, photos and text to your movies, and is good for producing online course content.
• Movie hosting: For one-off movie hosting nothing hits YouTube (free for unlimited use) — if it’s a lesson that only involves you training (i.e. — doesn’t showcase or mention the student), you could even post the movie publicly and let other students benefit from it. For online courses, we’ve built a fantastic platform at Coach (free for unlimited hosting, 10% transaction fee on courses sold) to host your movies and lessons.

Student homework

Coach’s Pick: Extempore for language tutors.

Oftentimes, tutors will assign students homework or practice questions to help reinforce the information the tutor’s been training. To do it, tutors usually use Word Documents and PDFs, but as online tutoring evolves, more tutors are using web products and mobile apps to help with things like assigning homework.

Here’s a device that language tutors have recommended to us as something they use with their students:

• Extempore:Extempore ($29.99 per student/year; institutional licenses are available) is for speaking practice inbetween language tutors and students. Extempore permits students to record their homework answers directly from their mobile device, which makes it effortless for tutors to review in real-time.
• Squid:Squid (free with in-app purchases) is a handwritten note-taking application for Android that has two excellent use cases for teachers. Very first, teachers can import PDF worksheets into Squid and students can do the work directly on the sheets before exporting and sending them back to the train for review. 2nd, tutors can import work that the student has done, mark it up, and send it back to the student to see what they did wrong.

Online course builder alternatives

The Online Tutor’s Toolbelt

To sum it all up, we at Coach recommend using:

• Movie talk:Skype for 1-on-1 sessions, Google Hangouts for group sessions.
• Virtual whiteboard:Baiboard for iPad, Idroo for Windows or Android.
• Document collaboration:Google Docs
• Screen recording and movie production:Camtasia for online courses, Screencast-O-Matic for live sessions. Animoto for editing standalone movies. YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

Instruct online like you instruct in person with these twelve instruments

Train online like you instruct in person with these twelve instruments

Some of the best tutors we know are moving their businesses online, and for good reason. Tutoring students online entirely eliminates the waste of spending your day traveling inbetween appointments, which can often eat up valuable tutoring hours.

And while tutoring online may be more efficient and convenient, it’s not without its challenges.

Not every subject transfers well from in-person to online: depending on the subjects you tutor, online tutoring may not yet be perfected. Until recently, it was almost unlikely to simulate the practice of freeform collaboration on a collective problem set online, as is common in math and science tutoring.

Forming an emotional connection can be challenging: when you begin training a fresh student, cracking the ice with a fresh student can becoming challenging, as it’s more difficult to make an emotional connection without being present in the room.

Looking to step up your marketing? Click below to join the fantastic Lindsay Dow, of Lindsay Does Languages, for a free 5-part online teacher marketing course.

Holding the student’s attention: when screens are open and there’s no in-person supervision, there will undoubtedly be distracting windows open on your student’s screen.

The good news is, problems like these can be solved in a multiplicity of ways, from modifying your training treatment to using fresh implements and software that help you get the job done.

Let’s walk through the software setup we at Coach recommend for the online tutor’s toolbelt.

Movie talk

Coach’s Picks: Skype for 1-on-1 online tutoring sessions, Google Hangouts for group online tutoring sessions.

Both Skype and Google Hangouts (free for unlimited use, tho’ Skype offers a premium plan for group calling) are mature products that work well and provide most of the same features: free 1–1 movie or voice calls, screen sharing, file sharing and talk.

With the launch of Google Hangouts On-Air, it’s now possible to schedule a free group session in advance, which will be recorded and available after the session for students to re-watch.

This is a fantastic contraption for online group tutoring — in a 6-week course, it’s unlikely that every student will be able to make every session, but with Hangouts On-Air they won’t fall behind.

Virtual whiteboard

Coach’s Picks: Baiboard for 1–1 or group tutoring sessions if you have an iPad, Idroo if you’re on a Windows or Android tablet.

For subjects like science and math, it’s critical to simulate the practice of sitting next to a student, crowded around a single exercise on paper or in a book.

When the only implements at our disposition were the keyboard and mouse, this was indeed raunchy — there’s nothing clunkier than attempting to scribble math notation on a problem set with a mouse.

With the introduction of the iPad (and other tablets) and a host of networked whiteboarding apps, everything switched. The best whiteboarding apps on the market sate a few conditions:

• Real-time: You and the student are looking at the same document, with a minimal network lag time.
• Simultaneous: Numerous people can edit the document at the same time.
• Lithe canvas: Permits you to upload any document to be used as the background for the lesson.
• Persistent: Whiteboard sessions are stored, so that either you or the student can review the lesson afterwards (or you can share with another student or tutor).

There are five apps on the market that please these conditions, and are mature enough products to be trusted in tutoring sessions:

• Idroo (free for limited use, €10 a month for unlimited use) provides all of the features listed above, with a slick drag-and-drop interface for adding pictures to your training canvas. It’s also compatible with Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS and Android, so you can make use of it without an iPad. Our one issue with Idroo is the free plan only permits you to upload the very first two pages of a document for use in the canvas, making it of limited use for total lessons.
• Baiboard (free for unlimited use) is fantastic for conducting group sessions, as it can accommodate up to forty participants on the same board at once. It also offers iPad-to-browser sharing, so that students can participate from anywhere.
• Groupboard (free for one whiteboard, $9.99/month up to $499/one-time for more whiteboards) provides most of the same features as Idroo and Baiboard, but with a few key limitations: the free plan tops out at five users on one whiteboard, and background pics must be image-formatted (vs PDF). Lack of PDF compatibility is a dealbreaker for many tutors — but if you’re partial to Google Hangouts and don’t need PDFs, Groupboard offers a slick integration that embeds a board into your Hangout session.
• WizIQ ($16 — $1,000+/month depending on number of whiteboards / students needed) is a full-fledged e-learning platform, which has an accompanying virtual classroom app. While it includes all of the key features mentioned above, it also integrates with Learning Management Systems like Moodle and Blackboard. If you’re running an online school with a long-term student base (vs conducting tutoring sessions), then WizIQ is for you.
• Scribblar ($14-$39 depending on number of ‘rooms’) is unique in that it permits you to integrate an online whiteboard directly into your own website, versus using the whiteboard on Scribblar’s own site. Leyla Norman of Empower English Tutoring likes using it because of the persistent nature of Scribblar classrooms, which permit students to refer back to sessions and keep track of work week-to-week.

Document collaboration

Coach’s Pick: Google Docs, enough said. Simply the best online document collaboration implement for tutoring.

There’s only one king of the Online Collective Document Jungle. Google Docs is free for unlimited use.

Screen recording

Coach’s Picks: Camtasia and Screencast-O-Matic for screen recording, Animoto for movie editing, YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

Many tutors find it useful to record sessions with students, so that the student can review the lesson later on. It’s also a fine way to self-critique your own training methods, and make improvements.

If you’re planning to develop an online course at some point, screen recording can be used to seed content and lessons. Just think about how many courses you’d already have ready if you’d recorded every one of your tutoring sessions.

There are a few necessary, complementary contraptions in the online tutors movie recording toolbelt:

• Screen recording:Camtasia ($99 for Mac, $299 for PC) and Screencast-O-Matic (free for fifteen minutes or less, $15/year for unlimited) both suggest easy-to-use screen recording devices for Windows and Mac, which permit you to produce beautiful movies with a minimal learning curve. Camtasia has a more advanced movie editor, and also offers mobile recording for Mac (by connecting your tablet or phone to your Mac with a lightning cable). The choice inbetween them truly comes down to how you’re using screen recordings — if you’re building an online course, we’d recommend Camtasia, but if you’re recording student sessions to save for them, we’d recommend Screencast-O-Matic.
• Movie editing: Both Camtasia and the pro version of Screen-o-Matic come with movie editing implements built-in. But if you’re looking for a standalone editing device (and don’t want to opt for a professional instrument like Final Cut Pro), we’d recommend Animoto ($8/month). It permits you to add music, photos and text to your movies, and is superb for producing online course content.
• Movie hosting: For one-off movie hosting nothing hammers YouTube (free for unlimited use) — if it’s a lesson that only involves you instructing (i.e. — doesn’t display or mention the student), you could even post the movie publicly and let other students benefit from it. For online courses, we’ve built a fantastic platform at Coach (free for unlimited hosting, 10% transaction fee on courses sold) to host your movies and lessons.

Student homework

Coach’s Pick: Extempore for language tutors.

Oftentimes, tutors will assign students homework or practice questions to help reinforce the information the tutor’s been instructing. To do it, tutors usually use Word Documents and PDFs, but as online tutoring evolves, more tutors are using web products and mobile apps to help with things like assigning homework.

Here’s a contraption that language tutors have recommended to us as something they use with their students:

• Extempore:Extempore ($29.99 per student/year; institutional licenses are available) is for speaking practice inbetween language tutors and students. Extempore permits students to record their homework answers directly from their mobile device, which makes it effortless for tutors to review in real-time.
• Squid:Squid (free with in-app purchases) is a handwritten note-taking application for Android that has two fine use cases for teachers. Very first, teachers can import PDF worksheets into Squid and students can do the work directly on the sheets before exporting and sending them back to the train for review. 2nd, tutors can import work that the student has done, mark it up, and send it back to the student to see what they did wrong.

Online course builder alternatives

The Online Tutor’s Toolbelt

To sum it all up, we at Coach recommend using:

• Movie talk:Skype for 1-on-1 sessions, Google Hangouts for group sessions.
• Virtual whiteboard:Baiboard for iPad, Idroo for Windows or Android.
• Document collaboration:Google Docs
• Screen recording and movie production:Camtasia for online courses, Screencast-O-Matic for live sessions. Animoto for editing standalone movies. YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

Train online like you instruct in person with these twelve contraptions

Instruct online like you instruct in person with these twelve devices

Some of the best tutors we know are moving their businesses online, and for good reason. Tutoring students online totally eliminates the waste of spending your day traveling inbetween appointments, which can often eat up valuable tutoring hours.

And while tutoring online may be more efficient and convenient, it’s not without its challenges.

Not every subject transfers well from in-person to online: depending on the subjects you tutor, online tutoring may not yet be perfected. Until recently, it was almost unlikely to simulate the practice of freeform collaboration on a collective problem set online, as is common in math and science tutoring.

Forming an emotional connection can be challenging: when you begin instructing a fresh student, violating the ice with a fresh student can becoming challenging, as it’s more difficult to make an emotional connection without being present in the room.

Looking to step up your marketing? Click below to join the fantastic Lindsay Dow, of Lindsay Does Languages, for a free 5-part online teacher marketing course.

Holding the student’s attention: when screens are open and there’s no in-person supervision, there will undoubtedly be distracting windows open on your student’s screen.

The good news is, problems like these can be solved in a multiplicity of ways, from modifying your training treatment to using fresh devices and software that help you get the job done.

Let’s walk through the software setup we at Coach recommend for the online tutor’s toolbelt.

Movie talk

Coach’s Picks: Skype for 1-on-1 online tutoring sessions, Google Hangouts for group online tutoring sessions.

Both Skype and Google Hangouts (free for unlimited use, however Skype offers a premium plan for group calling) are mature products that work well and provide most of the same features: free 1–1 movie or voice calls, screen sharing, file sharing and talk.

With the launch of Google Hangouts On-Air, it’s now possible to schedule a free group session in advance, which will be recorded and available after the session for students to re-watch.

This is a fantastic instrument for online group tutoring — in a 6-week course, it’s unlikely that every student will be able to make every session, but with Hangouts On-Air they won’t fall behind.

Virtual whiteboard

Coach’s Picks: Baiboard for 1–1 or group tutoring sessions if you have an iPad, Idroo if you’re on a Windows or Android tablet.

For subjects like science and math, it’s critical to simulate the practice of sitting next to a student, crowded around a single exercise on paper or in a book.

When the only contraptions at our disposition were the keyboard and mouse, this was truly rough — there’s nothing clunkier than attempting to scribble math notation on a problem set with a mouse.

With the introduction of the iPad (and other tablets) and a host of networked whiteboarding apps, everything switched. The best whiteboarding apps on the market please a few conditions:

• Real-time: You and the student are looking at the same document, with a minimal network lag time.
• Simultaneous: Numerous people can edit the document at the same time.
• Pliable canvas: Permits you to upload any document to be used as the background for the lesson.
• Persistent: Whiteboard sessions are stored, so that either you or the student can review the lesson afterwards (or you can share with another student or tutor).

There are five apps on the market that sate these conditions, and are mature enough products to be trusted in tutoring sessions:

• Idroo (free for limited use, €10 a month for unlimited use) provides all of the features listed above, with a slick drag-and-drop interface for adding pics to your instructing canvas. It’s also compatible with Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS and Android, so you can make use of it without an iPad. Our one issue with Idroo is the free plan only permits you to upload the very first two pages of a document for use in the canvas, making it of limited use for utter lessons.
• Baiboard (free for unlimited use) is fantastic for conducting group sessions, as it can accommodate up to forty participants on the same board at once. It also offers iPad-to-browser sharing, so that students can participate from anywhere.
• Groupboard (free for one whiteboard, $9.99/month up to $499/one-time for more whiteboards) provides most of the same features as Idroo and Baiboard, but with a few key limitations: the free plan tops out at five users on one whiteboard, and background pictures must be image-formatted (vs PDF). Lack of PDF compatibility is a dealbreaker for many tutors — but if you’re partial to Google Hangouts and don’t need PDFs, Groupboard offers a slick integration that embeds a board into your Hangout session.
• WizIQ ($16 — $1,000+/month depending on number of whiteboards / students needed) is a full-fledged e-learning platform, which has an accompanying virtual classroom app. While it includes all of the key features mentioned above, it also integrates with Learning Management Systems like Moodle and Blackboard. If you’re running an online school with a long-term student base (vs conducting tutoring sessions), then WizIQ is for you.
• Scribblar ($14-$39 depending on number of ‘rooms’) is unique in that it permits you to integrate an online whiteboard directly into your own website, versus using the whiteboard on Scribblar’s own site. Leyla Norman of Empower English Tutoring loves using it because of the persistent nature of Scribblar classrooms, which permit students to refer back to sessions and keep track of work week-to-week.

Document collaboration

Coach’s Pick: Google Docs, enough said. Simply the best online document collaboration contraption for tutoring.

There’s only one king of the Online Collective Document Jungle. Google Docs is free for unlimited use.

Screen recording

Coach’s Picks: Camtasia and Screencast-O-Matic for screen recording, Animoto for movie editing, YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

Many tutors find it useful to record sessions with students, so that the student can review the lesson later on. It’s also a good way to self-critique your own training methods, and make improvements.

If you’re planning to develop an online course at some point, screen recording can be used to seed content and lessons. Just think about how many courses you’d already have ready if you’d recorded every one of your tutoring sessions.

There are a few necessary, complementary instruments in the online tutors movie recording toolbelt:

• Screen recording:Camtasia ($99 for Mac, $299 for PC) and Screencast-O-Matic (free for fifteen minutes or less, $15/year for unlimited) both suggest easy-to-use screen recording contraptions for Windows and Mac, which permit you to produce beautiful movies with a minimal learning curve. Camtasia has a more advanced movie editor, and also offers mobile recording for Mac (by connecting your tablet or phone to your Mac with a lightning cable). The choice inbetween them truly comes down to how you’re using screen recordings — if you’re building an online course, we’d recommend Camtasia, but if you’re recording student sessions to save for them, we’d recommend Screencast-O-Matic.
• Movie editing: Both Camtasia and the pro version of Screen-o-Matic come with movie editing contraptions built-in. But if you’re looking for a standalone editing contraption (and don’t want to opt for a professional implement like Final Cut Pro), we’d recommend Animoto ($8/month). It permits you to add music, photos and text to your movies, and is superb for producing online course content.
• Movie hosting: For one-off movie hosting nothing hits YouTube (free for unlimited use) — if it’s a lesson that only involves you training (i.e. — doesn’t showcase or mention the student), you could even post the movie publicly and let other students benefit from it. For online courses, we’ve built a fantastic platform at Coach (free for unlimited hosting, 10% transaction fee on courses sold) to host your movies and lessons.

Student homework

Coach’s Pick: Extempore for language tutors.

Oftentimes, tutors will assign students homework or practice questions to help reinforce the information the tutor’s been training. To do it, tutors usually use Word Documents and PDFs, but as online tutoring evolves, more tutors are using web products and mobile apps to help with things like assigning homework.

Here’s a contraption that language tutors have recommended to us as something they use with their students:

• Extempore:Extempore ($29.99 per student/year; institutional licenses are available) is for speaking practice inbetween language tutors and students. Extempore permits students to record their homework answers directly from their mobile device, which makes it effortless for tutors to review in real-time.
• Squid:Squid (free with in-app purchases) is a handwritten note-taking application for Android that has two good use cases for teachers. Very first, teachers can import PDF worksheets into Squid and students can do the work directly on the sheets before exporting and sending them back to the train for review. 2nd, tutors can import work that the student has done, mark it up, and send it back to the student to see what they did wrong.

Online course builder alternatives

The Online Tutor’s Toolbelt

To sum it all up, we at Coach recommend using:

• Movie talk:Skype for 1-on-1 sessions, Google Hangouts for group sessions.
• Virtual whiteboard:Baiboard for iPad, Idroo for Windows or Android.
• Document collaboration:Google Docs
• Screen recording and movie production:Camtasia for online courses, Screencast-O-Matic for live sessions. Animoto for editing standalone movies. YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

Train online like you train in person with these twelve implements

Instruct online like you train in person with these twelve devices

Some of the best tutors we know are moving their businesses online, and for good reason. Tutoring students online downright eliminates the waste of spending your day traveling inbetween appointments, which can often eat up valuable tutoring hours.

And while tutoring online may be more efficient and convenient, it’s not without its challenges.

Not every subject transfers well from in-person to online: depending on the subjects you tutor, online tutoring may not yet be perfected. Until recently, it was almost unlikely to simulate the practice of freeform collaboration on a collective problem set online, as is common in math and science tutoring.

Forming an emotional connection can be challenging: when you begin instructing a fresh student, cracking the ice with a fresh student can becoming challenging, as it’s more difficult to make an emotional connection without being present in the room.

Looking to step up your marketing? Click below to join the fantastic Lindsay Dow, of Lindsay Does Languages, for a free 5-part online teacher marketing course.

Holding the student’s attention: when screens are open and there’s no in-person supervision, there will undoubtedly be distracting windows open on your student’s screen.

The good news is, problems like these can be solved in a diversity of ways, from modifying your training treatment to using fresh devices and software that help you get the job done.

Let’s walk through the software setup we at Coach recommend for the online tutor’s toolbelt.

Movie talk

Coach’s Picks: Skype for 1-on-1 online tutoring sessions, Google Hangouts for group online tutoring sessions.

Both Skype and Google Hangouts (free for unlimited use, however Skype offers a premium plan for group calling) are mature products that work well and provide most of the same features: free 1–1 movie or voice calls, screen sharing, file sharing and talk.

With the launch of Google Hangouts On-Air, it’s now possible to schedule a free group session in advance, which will be recorded and available after the session for students to re-watch.

This is a fantastic contraption for online group tutoring — in a 6-week course, it’s unlikely that every student will be able to make every session, but with Hangouts On-Air they won’t fall behind.

Virtual whiteboard

Coach’s Picks: Baiboard for 1–1 or group tutoring sessions if you have an iPad, Idroo if you’re on a Windows or Android tablet.

For subjects like science and math, it’s critical to simulate the practice of sitting next to a student, crowded around a single exercise on paper or in a book.

When the only implements at our disposition were the keyboard and mouse, this was truly rough — there’s nothing clunkier than attempting to scribble math notation on a problem set with a mouse.

With the introduction of the iPad (and other tablets) and a host of networked whiteboarding apps, everything switched. The best whiteboarding apps on the market sate a few conditions:

• Real-time: You and the student are looking at the same document, with a minimal network lag time.
• Simultaneous: Numerous people can edit the document at the same time.
• Supple canvas: Permits you to upload any document to be used as the background for the lesson.
• Persistent: Whiteboard sessions are stored, so that either you or the student can review the lesson afterwards (or you can share with another student or tutor).

There are five apps on the market that please these conditions, and are mature enough products to be trusted in tutoring sessions:

• Idroo (free for limited use, €10 a month for unlimited use) provides all of the features listed above, with a slick drag-and-drop interface for adding photos to your training canvas. It’s also compatible with Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS and Android, so you can make use of it without an iPad. Our one issue with Idroo is the free plan only permits you to upload the very first two pages of a document for use in the canvas, making it of limited use for utter lessons.
• Baiboard (free for unlimited use) is fantastic for conducting group sessions, as it can accommodate up to forty participants on the same board at once. It also offers iPad-to-browser sharing, so that students can participate from anywhere.
• Groupboard (free for one whiteboard, $9.99/month up to $499/one-time for more whiteboards) provides most of the same features as Idroo and Baiboard, but with a few key limitations: the free plan tops out at five users on one whiteboard, and background pictures must be image-formatted (vs PDF). Lack of PDF compatibility is a dealbreaker for many tutors — but if you’re partial to Google Hangouts and don’t need PDFs, Groupboard offers a slick integration that embeds a board into your Hangout session.
• WizIQ ($16 — $1,000+/month depending on number of whiteboards / students needed) is a full-fledged e-learning platform, which has an accompanying virtual classroom app. While it includes all of the key features mentioned above, it also integrates with Learning Management Systems like Moodle and Blackboard. If you’re running an online school with a long-term student base (vs conducting tutoring sessions), then WizIQ is for you.
• Scribblar ($14-$39 depending on number of ‘rooms’) is unique in that it permits you to integrate an online whiteboard directly into your own website, versus using the whiteboard on Scribblar’s own site. Leyla Norman of Empower English Tutoring loves using it because of the persistent nature of Scribblar classrooms, which permit students to refer back to sessions and keep track of work week-to-week.

Document collaboration

Coach’s Pick: Google Docs, enough said. Simply the best online document collaboration instrument for tutoring.

There’s only one king of the Online Collective Document Jungle. Google Docs is free for unlimited use.

Screen recording

Coach’s Picks: Camtasia and Screencast-O-Matic for screen recording, Animoto for movie editing, YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

Many tutors find it useful to record sessions with students, so that the student can review the lesson later on. It’s also a good way to self-critique your own instructing methods, and make improvements.

If you’re planning to develop an online course at some point, screen recording can be used to seed content and lessons. Just think about how many courses you’d already have ready if you’d recorded every one of your tutoring sessions.

There are a few necessary, complementary instruments in the online tutors movie recording toolbelt:

• Screen recording:Camtasia ($99 for Mac, $299 for PC) and Screencast-O-Matic (free for fifteen minutes or less, $15/year for unlimited) both suggest easy-to-use screen recording instruments for Windows and Mac, which permit you to produce beautiful movies with a minimal learning curve. Camtasia has a more advanced movie editor, and also offers mobile recording for Mac (by connecting your tablet or phone to your Mac with a lightning cable). The choice inbetween them indeed comes down to how you’re using screen recordings — if you’re building an online course, we’d recommend Camtasia, but if you’re recording student sessions to save for them, we’d recommend Screencast-O-Matic.
• Movie editing: Both Camtasia and the pro version of Screen-o-Matic come with movie editing instruments built-in. But if you’re looking for a standalone editing implement (and don’t want to opt for a professional instrument like Final Cut Pro), we’d recommend Animoto ($8/month). It permits you to add music, photos and text to your movies, and is good for producing online course content.
• Movie hosting: For one-off movie hosting nothing hammers YouTube (free for unlimited use) — if it’s a lesson that only involves you training (i.e. — doesn’t display or mention the student), you could even post the movie publicly and let other students benefit from it. For online courses, we’ve built a fantastic platform at Coach (free for unlimited hosting, 10% transaction fee on courses sold) to host your movies and lessons.

Student homework

Coach’s Pick: Extempore for language tutors.

Oftentimes, tutors will assign students homework or practice questions to help reinforce the information the tutor’s been instructing. To do it, tutors usually use Word Documents and PDFs, but as online tutoring evolves, more tutors are using web products and mobile apps to help with things like assigning homework.

Here’s a implement that language tutors have recommended to us as something they use with their students:

• Extempore:Extempore ($29.99 per student/year; institutional licenses are available) is for speaking practice inbetween language tutors and students. Extempore permits students to record their homework answers directly from their mobile device, which makes it effortless for tutors to review in real-time.
• Squid:Squid (free with in-app purchases) is a handwritten note-taking application for Android that has two good use cases for teachers. Very first, teachers can import PDF worksheets into Squid and students can do the work directly on the sheets before exporting and sending them back to the instruct for review. 2nd, tutors can import work that the student has done, mark it up, and send it back to the student to see what they did wrong.

Online course builder alternatives

The Online Tutor’s Toolbelt

To sum it all up, we at Coach recommend using:

• Movie talk:Skype for 1-on-1 sessions, Google Hangouts for group sessions.
• Virtual whiteboard:Baiboard for iPad, Idroo for Windows or Android.
• Document collaboration:Google Docs
• Screen recording and movie production:Camtasia for online courses, Screencast-O-Matic for live sessions. Animoto for editing standalone movies. YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

Train online like you instruct in person with these twelve implements

Instruct online like you train in person with these twelve contraptions

Some of the best tutors we know are moving their businesses online, and for good reason. Tutoring students online totally eliminates the waste of spending your day traveling inbetween appointments, which can often eat up valuable tutoring hours.

And while tutoring online may be more efficient and convenient, it’s not without its challenges.

Not every subject transfers well from in-person to online: depending on the subjects you tutor, online tutoring may not yet be perfected. Until recently, it was almost unlikely to simulate the practice of freeform collaboration on a collective problem set online, as is common in math and science tutoring.

Forming an emotional connection can be challenging: when you begin instructing a fresh student, cracking the ice with a fresh student can becoming challenging, as it’s more difficult to make an emotional connection without being present in the room.

Looking to step up your marketing? Click below to join the fantastic Lindsay Dow, of Lindsay Does Languages, for a free 5-part online teacher marketing course.

Holding the student’s attention: when screens are open and there’s no in-person supervision, there will undoubtedly be distracting windows open on your student’s screen.

The good news is, problems like these can be solved in a diversity of ways, from modifying your training treatment to using fresh instruments and software that help you get the job done.

Let’s walk through the software setup we at Coach recommend for the online tutor’s toolbelt.

Movie talk

Coach’s Picks: Skype for 1-on-1 online tutoring sessions, Google Hangouts for group online tutoring sessions.

Both Skype and Google Hangouts (free for unlimited use, however Skype offers a premium plan for group calling) are mature products that work well and provide most of the same features: free 1–1 movie or voice calls, screen sharing, file sharing and talk.

With the launch of Google Hangouts On-Air, it’s now possible to schedule a free group session in advance, which will be recorded and available after the session for students to re-watch.

This is a fantastic implement for online group tutoring — in a 6-week course, it’s unlikely that every student will be able to make every session, but with Hangouts On-Air they won’t fall behind.

Virtual whiteboard

Coach’s Picks: Baiboard for 1–1 or group tutoring sessions if you have an iPad, Idroo if you’re on a Windows or Android tablet.

For subjects like science and math, it’s critical to simulate the practice of sitting next to a student, crowded around a single exercise on paper or in a book.

When the only devices at our disposition were the keyboard and mouse, this was indeed harsh — there’s nothing clunkier than attempting to scribble math notation on a problem set with a mouse.

With the introduction of the iPad (and other tablets) and a host of networked whiteboarding apps, everything switched. The best whiteboarding apps on the market please a few conditions:

• Real-time: You and the student are looking at the same document, with a minimal network lag time.
• Simultaneous: Numerous people can edit the document at the same time.
• Pliable canvas: Permits you to upload any document to be used as the background for the lesson.
• Persistent: Whiteboard sessions are stored, so that either you or the student can review the lesson afterwards (or you can share with another student or tutor).

There are five apps on the market that please these conditions, and are mature enough products to be trusted in tutoring sessions:

• Idroo (free for limited use, €10 a month for unlimited use) provides all of the features listed above, with a slick drag-and-drop interface for adding pics to your instructing canvas. It’s also compatible with Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS and Android, so you can make use of it without an iPad. Our one issue with Idroo is the free plan only permits you to upload the very first two pages of a document for use in the canvas, making it of limited use for total lessons.
• Baiboard (free for unlimited use) is fantastic for conducting group sessions, as it can accommodate up to forty participants on the same board at once. It also offers iPad-to-browser sharing, so that students can participate from anywhere.
• Groupboard (free for one whiteboard, $9.99/month up to $499/one-time for more whiteboards) provides most of the same features as Idroo and Baiboard, but with a few key limitations: the free plan tops out at five users on one whiteboard, and background pictures must be image-formatted (vs PDF). Lack of PDF compatibility is a dealbreaker for many tutors — but if you’re partial to Google Hangouts and don’t need PDFs, Groupboard offers a slick integration that embeds a board into your Hangout session.
• WizIQ ($16 — $1,000+/month depending on number of whiteboards / students needed) is a full-fledged e-learning platform, which has an accompanying virtual classroom app. While it includes all of the key features mentioned above, it also integrates with Learning Management Systems like Moodle and Blackboard. If you’re running an online school with a long-term student base (vs conducting tutoring sessions), then WizIQ is for you.
• Scribblar ($14-$39 depending on number of ‘rooms’) is unique in that it permits you to integrate an online whiteboard directly into your own website, versus using the whiteboard on Scribblar’s own site. Leyla Norman of Empower English Tutoring loves using it because of the persistent nature of Scribblar classrooms, which permit students to refer back to sessions and keep track of work week-to-week.

Document collaboration

Coach’s Pick: Google Docs, enough said. Simply the best online document collaboration device for tutoring.

There’s only one king of the Online Collective Document Jungle. Google Docs is free for unlimited use.

Screen recording

Coach’s Picks: Camtasia and Screencast-O-Matic for screen recording, Animoto for movie editing, YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

Many tutors find it useful to record sessions with students, so that the student can review the lesson later on. It’s also a superb way to self-critique your own instructing methods, and make improvements.

If you’re planning to develop an online course at some point, screen recording can be used to seed content and lessons. Just think about how many courses you’d already have ready if you’d recorded every one of your tutoring sessions.

There are a few necessary, complementary implements in the online tutors movie recording toolbelt:

• Screen recording:Camtasia ($99 for Mac, $299 for PC) and Screencast-O-Matic (free for fifteen minutes or less, $15/year for unlimited) both suggest easy-to-use screen recording contraptions for Windows and Mac, which permit you to produce beautiful movies with a minimal learning curve. Camtasia has a more advanced movie editor, and also offers mobile recording for Mac (by connecting your tablet or phone to your Mac with a lightning cable). The choice inbetween them indeed comes down to how you’re using screen recordings — if you’re building an online course, we’d recommend Camtasia, but if you’re recording student sessions to save for them, we’d recommend Screencast-O-Matic.
• Movie editing: Both Camtasia and the pro version of Screen-o-Matic come with movie editing contraptions built-in. But if you’re looking for a standalone editing implement (and don’t want to opt for a professional device like Final Cut Pro), we’d recommend Animoto ($8/month). It permits you to add music, photos and text to your movies, and is fine for producing online course content.
• Movie hosting: For one-off movie hosting nothing hits YouTube (free for unlimited use) — if it’s a lesson that only involves you instructing (i.e. — doesn’t display or mention the student), you could even post the movie publicly and let other students benefit from it. For online courses, we’ve built a fantastic platform at Coach (free for unlimited hosting, 10% transaction fee on courses sold) to host your movies and lessons.

Student homework

Coach’s Pick: Extempore for language tutors.

Oftentimes, tutors will assign students homework or practice questions to help reinforce the information the tutor’s been instructing. To do it, tutors usually use Word Documents and PDFs, but as online tutoring evolves, more tutors are using web products and mobile apps to help with things like assigning homework.

Here’s a device that language tutors have recommended to us as something they use with their students:

• Extempore:Extempore ($29.99 per student/year; institutional licenses are available) is for speaking practice inbetween language tutors and students. Extempore permits students to record their homework answers directly from their mobile device, which makes it effortless for tutors to review in real-time.
• Squid:Squid (free with in-app purchases) is a handwritten note-taking application for Android that has two fine use cases for teachers. Very first, teachers can import PDF worksheets into Squid and students can do the work directly on the sheets before exporting and sending them back to the instruct for review. 2nd, tutors can import work that the student has done, mark it up, and send it back to the student to see what they did wrong.

Online course builder alternatives

The Online Tutor’s Toolbelt

To sum it all up, we at Coach recommend using:

• Movie talk:Skype for 1-on-1 sessions, Google Hangouts for group sessions.
• Virtual whiteboard:Baiboard for iPad, Idroo for Windows or Android.
• Document collaboration:Google Docs
• Screen recording and movie production:Camtasia for online courses, Screencast-O-Matic for live sessions. Animoto for editing standalone movies. YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

Instruct online like you instruct in person with these twelve implements

Instruct online like you train in person with these twelve implements

Some of the best tutors we know are moving their businesses online, and for good reason. Tutoring students online downright eliminates the waste of spending your day traveling inbetween appointments, which can often eat up valuable tutoring hours.

And while tutoring online may be more efficient and convenient, it’s not without its challenges.

Not every subject transfers well from in-person to online: depending on the subjects you tutor, online tutoring may not yet be perfected. Until recently, it was almost unlikely to simulate the practice of freeform collaboration on a collective problem set online, as is common in math and science tutoring.

Forming an emotional connection can be challenging: when you begin training a fresh student, violating the ice with a fresh student can becoming challenging, as it’s more difficult to make an emotional connection without being present in the room.

Looking to step up your marketing? Click below to join the fantastic Lindsay Dow, of Lindsay Does Languages, for a free 5-part online teacher marketing course.

Holding the student’s attention: when screens are open and there’s no in-person supervision, there will undoubtedly be distracting windows open on your student’s screen.

The good news is, problems like these can be solved in a diversity of ways, from modifying your instructing treatment to using fresh devices and software that help you get the job done.

Let’s walk through the software setup we at Coach recommend for the online tutor’s toolbelt.

Movie talk

Coach’s Picks: Skype for 1-on-1 online tutoring sessions, Google Hangouts for group online tutoring sessions.

Both Skype and Google Hangouts (free for unlimited use, however Skype offers a premium plan for group calling) are mature products that work well and provide most of the same features: free 1–1 movie or voice calls, screen sharing, file sharing and talk.

With the launch of Google Hangouts On-Air, it’s now possible to schedule a free group session in advance, which will be recorded and available after the session for students to re-watch.

This is a fantastic instrument for online group tutoring — in a 6-week course, it’s unlikely that every student will be able to make every session, but with Hangouts On-Air they won’t fall behind.

Virtual whiteboard

Coach’s Picks: Baiboard for 1–1 or group tutoring sessions if you have an iPad, Idroo if you’re on a Windows or Android tablet.

For subjects like science and math, it’s critical to simulate the practice of sitting next to a student, crowded around a single exercise on paper or in a book.

When the only contraptions at our disposition were the keyboard and mouse, this was truly harsh — there’s nothing clunkier than attempting to scribble math notation on a problem set with a mouse.

With the introduction of the iPad (and other tablets) and a host of networked whiteboarding apps, everything switched. The best whiteboarding apps on the market sate a few conditions:

• Real-time: You and the student are looking at the same document, with a minimal network lag time.
• Simultaneous: Numerous people can edit the document at the same time.
• Pliable canvas: Permits you to upload any document to be used as the background for the lesson.
• Persistent: Whiteboard sessions are stored, so that either you or the student can review the lesson afterwards (or you can share with another student or tutor).

There are five apps on the market that please these conditions, and are mature enough products to be trusted in tutoring sessions:

• Idroo (free for limited use, €10 a month for unlimited use) provides all of the features listed above, with a slick drag-and-drop interface for adding photos to your training canvas. It’s also compatible with Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS and Android, so you can make use of it without an iPad. Our one issue with Idroo is the free plan only permits you to upload the very first two pages of a document for use in the canvas, making it of limited use for total lessons.
• Baiboard (free for unlimited use) is fantastic for conducting group sessions, as it can accommodate up to forty participants on the same board at once. It also offers iPad-to-browser sharing, so that students can participate from anywhere.
• Groupboard (free for one whiteboard, $9.99/month up to $499/one-time for more whiteboards) provides most of the same features as Idroo and Baiboard, but with a few key limitations: the free plan tops out at five users on one whiteboard, and background pics must be image-formatted (vs PDF). Lack of PDF compatibility is a dealbreaker for many tutors — but if you’re partial to Google Hangouts and don’t need PDFs, Groupboard offers a slick integration that embeds a board into your Hangout session.
• WizIQ ($16 — $1,000+/month depending on number of whiteboards / students needed) is a full-fledged e-learning platform, which has an accompanying virtual classroom app. While it includes all of the key features mentioned above, it also integrates with Learning Management Systems like Moodle and Blackboard. If you’re running an online school with a long-term student base (vs conducting tutoring sessions), then WizIQ is for you.
• Scribblar ($14-$39 depending on number of ‘rooms’) is unique in that it permits you to integrate an online whiteboard directly into your own website, versus using the whiteboard on Scribblar’s own site. Leyla Norman of Empower English Tutoring likes using it because of the persistent nature of Scribblar classrooms, which permit students to refer back to sessions and keep track of work week-to-week.

Document collaboration

Coach’s Pick: Google Docs, enough said. Simply the best online document collaboration contraption for tutoring.

There’s only one king of the Online Collective Document Jungle. Google Docs is free for unlimited use.

Screen recording

Coach’s Picks: Camtasia and Screencast-O-Matic for screen recording, Animoto for movie editing, YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

Many tutors find it useful to record sessions with students, so that the student can review the lesson later on. It’s also a fine way to self-critique your own instructing methods, and make improvements.

If you’re planning to develop an online course at some point, screen recording can be used to seed content and lessons. Just think about how many courses you’d already have ready if you’d recorded every one of your tutoring sessions.

There are a few necessary, complementary implements in the online tutors movie recording toolbelt:

• Screen recording:Camtasia ($99 for Mac, $299 for PC) and Screencast-O-Matic (free for fifteen minutes or less, $15/year for unlimited) both suggest easy-to-use screen recording contraptions for Windows and Mac, which permit you to produce beautiful movies with a minimal learning curve. Camtasia has a more advanced movie editor, and also offers mobile recording for Mac (by connecting your tablet or phone to your Mac with a lightning cable). The choice inbetween them truly comes down to how you’re using screen recordings — if you’re building an online course, we’d recommend Camtasia, but if you’re recording student sessions to save for them, we’d recommend Screencast-O-Matic.
• Movie editing: Both Camtasia and the pro version of Screen-o-Matic come with movie editing devices built-in. But if you’re looking for a standalone editing instrument (and don’t want to opt for a professional device like Final Cut Pro), we’d recommend Animoto ($8/month). It permits you to add music, photos and text to your movies, and is fine for producing online course content.
• Movie hosting: For one-off movie hosting nothing strikes YouTube (free for unlimited use) — if it’s a lesson that only involves you training (i.e. — doesn’t showcase or mention the student), you could even post the movie publicly and let other students benefit from it. For online courses, we’ve built a fantastic platform at Coach (free for unlimited hosting, 10% transaction fee on courses sold) to host your movies and lessons.

Student homework

Coach’s Pick: Extempore for language tutors.

Oftentimes, tutors will assign students homework or practice questions to help reinforce the information the tutor’s been training. To do it, tutors usually use Word Documents and PDFs, but as online tutoring evolves, more tutors are using web products and mobile apps to help with things like assigning homework.

Here’s a contraption that language tutors have recommended to us as something they use with their students:

• Extempore:Extempore ($29.99 per student/year; institutional licenses are available) is for speaking practice inbetween language tutors and students. Extempore permits students to record their homework answers directly from their mobile device, which makes it effortless for tutors to review in real-time.
• Squid:Squid (free with in-app purchases) is a handwritten note-taking application for Android that has two superb use cases for teachers. Very first, teachers can import PDF worksheets into Squid and students can do the work directly on the sheets before exporting and sending them back to the instruct for review. 2nd, tutors can import work that the student has done, mark it up, and send it back to the student to see what they did wrong.

Online course builder alternatives

The Online Tutor’s Toolbelt

To sum it all up, we at Coach recommend using:

• Movie talk:Skype for 1-on-1 sessions, Google Hangouts for group sessions.
• Virtual whiteboard:Baiboard for iPad, Idroo for Windows or Android.
• Document collaboration:Google Docs
• Screen recording and movie production:Camtasia for online courses, Screencast-O-Matic for live sessions. Animoto for editing standalone movies. YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

Instruct online like you train in person with these twelve implements

Instruct online like you instruct in person with these twelve instruments

Some of the best tutors we know are moving their businesses online, and for good reason. Tutoring students online entirely eliminates the waste of spending your day traveling inbetween appointments, which can often eat up valuable tutoring hours.

And while tutoring online may be more efficient and convenient, it’s not without its challenges.

Not every subject transfers well from in-person to online: depending on the subjects you tutor, online tutoring may not yet be perfected. Until recently, it was almost unlikely to simulate the practice of freeform collaboration on a collective problem set online, as is common in math and science tutoring.

Forming an emotional connection can be challenging: when you begin instructing a fresh student, violating the ice with a fresh student can becoming challenging, as it’s more difficult to make an emotional connection without being present in the room.

Looking to step up your marketing? Click below to join the fantastic Lindsay Dow, of Lindsay Does Languages, for a free 5-part online teacher marketing course.

Holding the student’s attention: when screens are open and there’s no in-person supervision, there will undoubtedly be distracting windows open on your student’s screen.

The good news is, problems like these can be solved in a diversity of ways, from modifying your instructing treatment to using fresh implements and software that help you get the job done.

Let’s walk through the software setup we at Coach recommend for the online tutor’s toolbelt.

Movie talk

Coach’s Picks: Skype for 1-on-1 online tutoring sessions, Google Hangouts for group online tutoring sessions.

Both Skype and Google Hangouts (free for unlimited use, however Skype offers a premium plan for group calling) are mature products that work well and provide most of the same features: free 1–1 movie or voice calls, screen sharing, file sharing and talk.

With the launch of Google Hangouts On-Air, it’s now possible to schedule a free group session in advance, which will be recorded and available after the session for students to re-watch.

This is a fantastic instrument for online group tutoring — in a 6-week course, it’s unlikely that every student will be able to make every session, but with Hangouts On-Air they won’t fall behind.

Virtual whiteboard

Coach’s Picks: Baiboard for 1–1 or group tutoring sessions if you have an iPad, Idroo if you’re on a Windows or Android tablet.

For subjects like science and math, it’s critical to simulate the practice of sitting next to a student, crowded around a single exercise on paper or in a book.

When the only contraptions at our disposition were the keyboard and mouse, this was indeed raunchy — there’s nothing clunkier than attempting to scribble math notation on a problem set with a mouse.

With the introduction of the iPad (and other tablets) and a host of networked whiteboarding apps, everything switched. The best whiteboarding apps on the market sate a few conditions:

• Real-time: You and the student are looking at the same document, with a minimal network lag time.
• Simultaneous: Numerous people can edit the document at the same time.
• Nimble canvas: Permits you to upload any document to be used as the background for the lesson.
• Persistent: Whiteboard sessions are stored, so that either you or the student can review the lesson afterwards (or you can share with another student or tutor).

There are five apps on the market that sate these conditions, and are mature enough products to be trusted in tutoring sessions:

• Idroo (free for limited use, €10 a month for unlimited use) provides all of the features listed above, with a slick drag-and-drop interface for adding photos to your instructing canvas. It’s also compatible with Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS and Android, so you can make use of it without an iPad. Our one issue with Idroo is the free plan only permits you to upload the very first two pages of a document for use in the canvas, making it of limited use for total lessons.
• Baiboard (free for unlimited use) is fantastic for conducting group sessions, as it can accommodate up to forty participants on the same board at once. It also offers iPad-to-browser sharing, so that students can participate from anywhere.
• Groupboard (free for one whiteboard, $9.99/month up to $499/one-time for more whiteboards) provides most of the same features as Idroo and Baiboard, but with a few key limitations: the free plan tops out at five users on one whiteboard, and background pictures must be image-formatted (vs PDF). Lack of PDF compatibility is a dealbreaker for many tutors — but if you’re partial to Google Hangouts and don’t need PDFs, Groupboard offers a slick integration that embeds a board into your Hangout session.
• WizIQ ($16 — $1,000+/month depending on number of whiteboards / students needed) is a full-fledged e-learning platform, which has an accompanying virtual classroom app. While it includes all of the key features mentioned above, it also integrates with Learning Management Systems like Moodle and Blackboard. If you’re running an online school with a long-term student base (vs conducting tutoring sessions), then WizIQ is for you.
• Scribblar ($14-$39 depending on number of ‘rooms’) is unique in that it permits you to integrate an online whiteboard directly into your own website, versus using the whiteboard on Scribblar’s own site. Leyla Norman of Empower English Tutoring likes using it because of the persistent nature of Scribblar classrooms, which permit students to refer back to sessions and keep track of work week-to-week.

Document collaboration

Coach’s Pick: Google Docs, enough said. Simply the best online document collaboration device for tutoring.

There’s only one king of the Online Collective Document Jungle. Google Docs is free for unlimited use.

Screen recording

Coach’s Picks: Camtasia and Screencast-O-Matic for screen recording, Animoto for movie editing, YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

Many tutors find it useful to record sessions with students, so that the student can review the lesson later on. It’s also a fine way to self-critique your own instructing methods, and make improvements.

If you’re planning to develop an online course at some point, screen recording can be used to seed content and lessons. Just think about how many courses you’d already have ready if you’d recorded every one of your tutoring sessions.

There are a few necessary, complementary instruments in the online tutors movie recording toolbelt:

• Screen recording:Camtasia ($99 for Mac, $299 for PC) and Screencast-O-Matic (free for fifteen minutes or less, $15/year for unlimited) both suggest easy-to-use screen recording devices for Windows and Mac, which permit you to produce beautiful movies with a minimal learning curve. Camtasia has a more advanced movie editor, and also offers mobile recording for Mac (by connecting your tablet or phone to your Mac with a lightning cable). The choice inbetween them indeed comes down to how you’re using screen recordings — if you’re building an online course, we’d recommend Camtasia, but if you’re recording student sessions to save for them, we’d recommend Screencast-O-Matic.
• Movie editing: Both Camtasia and the pro version of Screen-o-Matic come with movie editing implements built-in. But if you’re looking for a standalone editing instrument (and don’t want to opt for a professional instrument like Final Cut Pro), we’d recommend Animoto ($8/month). It permits you to add music, photos and text to your movies, and is fine for producing online course content.
• Movie hosting: For one-off movie hosting nothing hits YouTube (free for unlimited use) — if it’s a lesson that only involves you instructing (i.e. — doesn’t demonstrate or mention the student), you could even post the movie publicly and let other students benefit from it. For online courses, we’ve built a fantastic platform at Coach (free for unlimited hosting, 10% transaction fee on courses sold) to host your movies and lessons.

Student homework

Coach’s Pick: Extempore for language tutors.

Oftentimes, tutors will assign students homework or practice questions to help reinforce the information the tutor’s been instructing. To do it, tutors usually use Word Documents and PDFs, but as online tutoring evolves, more tutors are using web products and mobile apps to help with things like assigning homework.

Here’s a device that language tutors have recommended to us as something they use with their students:

• Extempore:Extempore ($29.99 per student/year; institutional licenses are available) is for speaking practice inbetween language tutors and students. Extempore permits students to record their homework answers directly from their mobile device, which makes it effortless for tutors to review in real-time.
• Squid:Squid (free with in-app purchases) is a handwritten note-taking application for Android that has two superb use cases for teachers. Very first, teachers can import PDF worksheets into Squid and students can do the work directly on the sheets before exporting and sending them back to the instruct for review. 2nd, tutors can import work that the student has done, mark it up, and send it back to the student to see what they did wrong.

Online course builder alternatives

The Online Tutor’s Toolbelt

To sum it all up, we at Coach recommend using:

• Movie talk:Skype for 1-on-1 sessions, Google Hangouts for group sessions.
• Virtual whiteboard:Baiboard for iPad, Idroo for Windows or Android.
• Document collaboration:Google Docs
• Screen recording and movie production:Camtasia for online courses, Screencast-O-Matic for live sessions. Animoto for editing standalone movies. YouTube or Coach for movie hosting.

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