Beanbag

If you've recently logged into Beanbag you'll see we've made quite a few changes and I thought I'd just take a minute to explain why.

February 10th is Safer Internet Day an annual event (since 2004) thats promotes safe and responsible internet use in more than 50 countries worldwide.

As a part of this a series of workshops organised by Bristol Safeguarding Children Board, the South West Grid for Learning and Avon and Somerset Constabulary aims to educate parents of the risks children and young people can face on-line and how best to help deal with them.

The first workshop takes place at Monks Park School in Horfield (my old school!) and then take place throughout Bristol.

If you are not based in Bristol or if you can't make any of the workshops the South West Grid for Learning Trust have a download section with useful e-safety resources on their website which is well worth checking out.

The workshop identifies 11 golden rules for safe use of the internet and they are good. common sense guidelines rather than some of the scare mongering that takes place in the press.

Golden Rules' for safe use of the internet include:

Ground rules

    * keep information private - think, would I tell this to a stranger?
    * agree rules about meeting online ‘friends’ in real life
    * generally - if not acceptable in real life it shouldn’t be acceptable on line

Online safety

    * anti-virus and parental monitoring systems
    * online safety guides
    * activate security and privacy settings

Location

    * internet access should be in a family room, rather than a bedroom
    * be aware that devices such as gaming consoles or mobile phones can access the internet or via a neighbour’s wireless network

Dialogue

    * share the experience
    * get your children to teach you - this is better than any course you can go on
    * ensure they are happy to talk to you if they have a problem or feel uncomfortable

The Weekend edition of the Financial Times had a major feature on the rise of private tutoring in this country that is well worth a read for anyone with an interest in the subject.

For the most part it backs up our own experiences and research in the first six months of running Beanbag, though it does seem to suffer from some significant exaggerations in places (1.5 million tutors! £100 per hour!).

The big point it makes that we have always come up against is that their does still seem to be a certain amount of secrecy and stigma around tutoring despite its widespread use.  Parents don't like to admit their children are receiving tutoring and schools are loathe to admit their pupils are getting help elsewhere as it rather undermines their own claims of academic excellence!

The article also points out the huge range in the people who tutor. Even here on Beanbag amongst our almost 600 tutors we have a range from undergraduates offering help with GCSEs to former teachers with decades of experience and pretty much every level in between.

Something that is mentioned in the article that came out very clearly back when we originally researched the market for Beanbag was the issue of instilling confidence in the students.  This is something that is a real strength of one-to-one tutoring which is difficult to achieve in a class of 30 plus at school.

All-in-all its a pretty balanced article, not exactly an entirely glowing endorsement of the world of private tutoring but certainly not negative either and its interesting that the issue is seen to carry sufficient weight to warrant such a high profile article.

You can read the article on the Financial Times website for free.

Open Source Schools is a recently relaunched website (http://opensourceschools.org.uk/) that evangelises the use of open source software in education.  I think this is important generally for education as an understanding of the free software available, with an honest assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, is important for everyone involved in education (teacher, pupil or parent).

The cost of software is often a barrier to use, particularly specialist tools, and the ability to download equivalent tools for free opens up opportunities to a much wider audience.  Many of the leading open source tools are now much more user friendly than they have been in the past and the learning curve to use them is much less steep than versions gone by (and the similarities with leading paid-for software as far as how to use the software are far greater these days so skills are interchangeable often).

This is the first of a new, regular feature where we'll feature a website we have come across in our travels on the web that we think might be useful for Beanbag users.  Oh and just to say up front we have nothing to do with these sites other than finding them interesting.

The first of these is Cramberry - a cool, clever little website for creating interactive flashcards to help with revision etc.

Rather than try and describe them myself I'll leave that to their own blurb:

"Using Cramberry to study is simple. First, you create a blank "set" of flashcards. Cramberry will prompt you to give your set a name. All of your flashcards are stored in sets. Once you've created a blank set, Cramberry will help you add cards to the set. Adding cards with Cramberry is as simple as it is with traditional flashcards: just type in the text you want on the front and back of the card, and click on "add another card" to add another card to the set. Once you're satisfied with the amount of cards you have in your new set, click "finish".

Once you've set up one or more sets with the cards you want to study, actually learning them is simple. Click the title of the set from the home screen, and you're off! Cramberry will present you with the front of a random card. Try to guess what is on the back of that card, and then click on the button to find out if your guess was correct. If it was, click "correct". If not, click "incorrect". As you continue studying, Cramberry will keep track of which cards you know, and help you learn the ones you don't."

http://cramberry.net

The site is free and well worth a look so give it a go.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) was (is) a noble project originally based at MIT that aimed to create a cheap, durable laptop that could be used by children and educators in developing countries.  Despite these admirable goals the project has been dogged by issues almost since day one and the founder Nicholas Negroponte has seemingly done little but rub people up the wrong way in recent times.  Compromises to the original vision (moving from an open source operating system to Windows for instance), falling out with hardware suppliers like Intel and an inability to produce the laptop at the price originally strived for (it was often referred to as the $100 laptop in early days of the project) have contributed to the project losing some of its supporters.  The rise of cheap, commercially produced netbooks (which seem to have been somewhat inspired by OLPC) have also very much changed the environment worldwide.



OLPC now have responded to these issues and the current worldwide financial problems by reducing its staff by 50% and slashing wages for the remaining workforce.  This seems like a blow from which OLPC in its current form will be unable to recover from.  The organisation was struggling to achieve its targets with a full staff so how it expects to manage with half as many people who are likely to be unmotivated after a painful paycut is anyones guess.

As I'm sure you can imagine given what we do for a living, here at Beanbag Towers our twin passions are education and the web.  Some of us lean more heavily one way or the other but they are shared passions for everyone involved and in light of this we have worked alongside the guys at School of Everything to run an event combining the two.

Bettr is a one day event targeted at people who are using the web in new ways to help learning.  People from small companies, the BBC, Channel 4, charities like Futurelab as well as educators from school through to university level are attending to discuss how we can learn from each other to build the best possible tools to achieve this goal and how we can collaborate with the traditional education sector to make the most of these strides being taken in online learning.  It should be an interesting day, even more so as we are also co-hosting an event in the evening alongside the folk at Social Innovation Camp again focused on education but with a more flexible agenda and an even more eclectic audience.

Its something I'm very excited about and I'm sure I'll come away from the event with as many questions as answers but having been inspired again by how committed people are to making a difference.

A little late I know but things have been a bit hectic at Beanbag Towers since the turn of the year.  

The first six months of Beanbag have been an interesting ride - we now have more than 500 tutors and the amount of visitors to the site is increasing month to month.  We have also started a campaign of Google Ads to bring even more people to the site which is already proving to be a success.  The site evolved pretty rapidly over those first six months with dozens of changes made not only to the design but also to how the site worked behind the scenes - many of these changes were driven by user feedback and we will continue to seek this level of feedback going forward.  The innovation isn't stopping here though - 2008 was all about building a foundation and getting things started whereas 2009 is going to be about launching some really innovative, interesting features to add even more value to Beanbag Learning for both tutors, students and parents.

So a big thankyou to everyone who has visited the Beanbag Learning site in 2008 and lets look forward to an exciting 2009.

According to an article on the BBC website on Thursday 18th December more and more parents are using private tutoring to increase the chances of their children entering grammar schools.

The piece states that children who are tutored in the months leading up to the 11-plus exams can improve their results by a pretty amazing 40%.


While both Education authorities and grammar schools discourage private tutoring it is increasingly becoming the norm rather than an exception and for many parents represents a cheaper option than paying for private schools.

Here on Beanbag Learning we have a number of 11-plus tutors and our own small amount of research and anecdotal evidence backs up this rise in tutoring for children coming up to Secondary school, something that was initially something of a surprise to us here but it s obviously a fast growing area.

Recommendations are great for increasing the visibility of your profile on the Beanbaglearning website. By having a recommendation it soars your profile to the top of the list when a potential client makes a search, and immediately attracts that client to the recommended profile. Not only does it mean that your profile is easier to find, but a client could be more inclined to choose a tutor who has been recommended, giving them that extra confidence in the tutors teaching skills.

How to get a recommendation?

The best way to get a recommendation is to ask a student, current or previous, to write one. They will need to sign up first (which only takes a few minutes), then find the profile page and go to the recommendations section. 

Simply type in the recommendation and click 'recommend'. It couldn't be easier!

Uploading a photo to your profile is very simple, and is well worth doing; adding a picture will boost your online visibility on the beanbag homepage by appearing on the google map. So here’s a step-by-step guide in how to upload a photo to your profile:

.         1.    Sign in and go to your profile page.

2.        2.    Click on the picture icon and select ‘choose file’.

 

3.       3.    Find the picture you wish to use from your browser. This is usually under ‘My Pictures’ or ‘photos’. Select the picture and click ‘open’ or ‘choose’.

4.     4.    Now the photo has been selected, you then need to upload it by simply clicking ‘upload’.

 

5.       5.    The photo should then appear and you now have the option to crop the photo. If you’d like to do this, crop the picture by dragging the box over the area you wish to use, and click ‘crop photo’. If you don’t want to crop your photo, just click on the back button and it will take you back to your profile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve been working here at Beanbag for 6 weeks now, and thought it about time I add to the blogs and tell you a little bit about me and my experiences with tutors.

Private tutors have been a massive influence on my life. From the age of ten I’ve had singing lessons pretty much once a week. These lessons helped me realise my dream to be a musical theatre performer, and helped me to achieve a standard in singing which has made it possible for me to do that. It’s so important for a singer to have a secure technique, as it will enable consistency and stamina within the voice, and encourages vocal health. In my experiences and through teaching singing myself, I feel it important for children to begin learning a technique at a young age, thus preventing bad habits in singing, which could otherwise, lead to vocal disorders such as nodules.

Singing lessons haven’t been my only experience of private tutors. When I was taking my GCSE’s, I was lucky (not that I thought so at the time) to have both Math and French tuition, both of which I got below a C grade in my mock exams. My Mum took it upon herself to get me some extra help; one years worth of Maths tutoring brought me up from an E to a B grade, and with the extra French lessons I managed to achieve a C grade. Without this extra tuition, I’m certain I wouldn’t have achieved the grades I needed to get into sixth form. The private tutoring gave me the extra time and space away from the classroom to ask the questions I couldn’t ask in class, and as much time as I needed to grasp the areas of the subjects I struggled with.

Its been a busy couple of weeks here at Beanbag Towers and I have been neglecting this blog a little bit during that period so I thought I would do a quick update about whats been happening.

We made a pretty fundamental change to the way Beanbag works recently - replacing the drop-down menu of subjects based on the school curriculum (that more than one Beanbag user felt was limiting) with a subject tag based system that is entirely generated by the users.  This offers far greater flexibility to our members in describing the services they offer (for instance we now have a Yoga teacher for children on the site!).

Also we have recently moved beyond 400 tutors registered with the site.  We now have tutors the length and breadth of the UK (as well as a few in the USA, mainland Europe and Australia!).

Alot of other work has been done to improve the registration process, upgrade the privacy options on the site and to improve Beanbags findability on search engines (by which of course I mean Google!).

This work will continue and many more improvements will become apparent in the coming weeks and months so if there are any changes or features you would like to see please get in touch with me; matt@beanbaglearning.com

Yesterday was a bit of a banner day for education announcements during Gordon Browns speech at the Labour Conference in Manchester.  Alongside the leaked announcement about broadband vouchers there was also another major announcement of particular interest to the Beanbag community.

One-on-one tuition will be become a right for primary school children who are struggling with maths and English from 2011 (with pilot schemes running a year earlier).  This is a £315million programme so its been a good couple of days for those for an interest in one-to-one education and technology!

The full story can be found on the BBC website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7632194.stm

In a move that might well get buried amongst other announcements and the general speculation about his job Gordon Brown will today announce a new £300 million project to give 1.4 million children access to the internet at home.

This will consist of schools distributing vouchers worth between £100 and £700 to appropriate families and the vouchers will also be available for relevant software and in some cases computer hardware.

As well as helping the pupils access the internet to help with their studies and gain general IT skills it is hoped that wider access to the internet for the parents will make it easier for schools to maintain contact with the parents on issues such as homework and behavior issues.

This is great news as we here at Beanbag HQ strongly believe that there is an important role for the internet in education (alongside more traditional face-to-face learning rather than replacing it) but the key to the success of that is increasingly access to the internet and particularly broadband access.  Creating websites that will engage and hold the attention of children requires careful use of the latest web technologies and these require a good broadband connection to make the most of them.

In this period of economic crisis it is heartening to see education and technology rising to the top of the Governments agenda.

The BBC website is reporting a new initiative at a Scottish school to offer online assistance to pupils based on the lessons of the day.

The school, Alva Academy, will offer video and audio downloads recorded by the teachers offering recaps of lessons and extra guidance for homework.  Material like this is easily produced these days and the difficulty is getting people to commit to preparing the content for these 'shows' rather than any technology issues so its encouraging to hear about teachers getting behind such a project.

As the schools Deputy Head points out in the story students are more likely to engage with these offerings as it comes in a format that they are already familiar with and can integrate with their other online activities.

Here at Beanbag HQ we have been spending alot of time lately thinking about how a combination of technology and the right kind of teachers can help students and this sort of news is always encouraging.

Read the full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/tayside_and_central/7625680.stm

In the last few weeks the team here at Beanbag House has been growing at quite a pace.  Ed, Stefan and Lisa have all joined in the last month or so and I thought it was time they had a bit of an intro!

Stef joins us from Real World swapping a Peter Gabriel funded company in the lush countryside for a start-up opposite one of the noisiest building sites in Bristol.  Amongst other things Stef will make sure the site continues to look great and is easy to use.  He is also working on phase two of the Beanbag project which is Top Secret at the moment.

Ed joins us from Paperfly and as well as being a dab hand with power tools (as demonstrated by our lovely new wall mounted cork boards) is helping develop Beanbag on the technical side and also adding some much needed project management process to the team.  Ed also holds the office record for wearing shorts on consecutive days despite the terrible summer!

Lisa is the new Beanbag Community Advisor.  Her role is to help out current members as much as possible and help with the recruitment of new tutors.  Lisa has recently graduated from the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (yep the Paul McCartney place!) with a 1st Class degree in Performing Arts (Music) and spent her summer performing shows in Liverpool and Edinburgh.  As to why she is working at a web start-up with a bunch of geeky developers you'd have to ask her!

...well on the Guardian website as a feature on the PDA blog but still we are pretty pleased here at Beanbag Towers!

The post features a very fetching picture of founders Kevin and Jon (both myself and Pete managed to avoid that!) and is slightly out of date as we now have nearer 300 tutors and have made quite alot of improvements both to the site and our future strategy.

Still like the man said all publicity is good publicity so thanks to Jemima Kiss and the PDA team.

You can read the article here: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/09/elevator_pitch_beanbag.html

Introduce yourself 

Hi, I'm Will and I teach music in the Chester/Wirral/North Wales area.

How long have you been tutoring?

I have been teaching the piano now for 3 years. After qualifying as a teacher I did supply work in various schools in music and other subjects but found that the keyboard teaching aspect of the work to be the most rewarding so started taking on piano students privately from September 2005. This side of my teaching timetable now takes up most of my week and has the flexibility to fit around my other jobs which include conducting a local choral society, teaching music at a primary school and singing as a lay clerk (professional singer) in Chester Cathedral Choir.

What made you decide to start tutoring?

Having qualified as a teacher, piano tutoring gives me the opportunity to combine my teaching experience with one of my favorite pastimes, playing the piano.

Most rewarding part of tutoring?

The best bit about tutoring is being able to appreciate a student's progress. Perhaps they have found something particularly difficult and I have been able to help in some way (however apparently insignificant at the time).

Most challenging aspect of tutoring?

The most challenging aspect of tutoring is getting students who have lost interest and stopped practicing to get into it and get practicing again!

If you could sit on a Beanbag with anyone (historic or current) who would it be?

J.S Bach or Herbie Hancock

Will has his own website at http://www.williamhay.co.uk/ for more information

If you have visited the Beanbag homepage today you will see that we have made some pretty radical changes to the design in an attempt to make it even quicker and easier for you to find a tutor or get signed up if its your first visit.  The homepage now also shows the three most recently added tutors [well the three tutors with complete profile - tutors if you want to be featured be sure to add a photo!], a map that shows the location of another of our almost 300 tutors every time the page is refreshed as well as the two most recent blog posts by yours truly [if any tutor wishes to be featured in our Tutor of the Week slot or to provide a guest blog post just get in touch].

Not all the changes are so obvious though.  Alot of improvements have been made to make signing up even quicker and easier, we have done a great deal of work to help improve our findability via Google and we have also introduced Google advertising in some areas of the website.

As always your opinion is important to us so if you have any comments at all drop me a line.

After my blog post about home education last week the Guardian has done a follow up piece (!) in todays Education Guardian.  Spurred by the publication of a new book that is broadly supportive of home education, How Children Learn at Home by Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison (both of the Institute of Education at the University of London) it is a balanced piece of journalism that certainly does not dismiss home education (especially for younger children) but also points out some of its issues for older children looking to enter higher education.

It contains both examples of home education that will terrify many teaching professionals (like the child who did nothing but "watch Star Wars and play on the trampoline" til he was 12!) but also some examples of children who have been very successful through home education and have successfully made the tranistion to either college or university later on.

It seem that home education (or home schooling as our colonial cousins call it) is on the rise in the UK, especially with primary school aged children.  A growing reason for this seems to be an effort to free the child from the ever earlier pressures of tests and assessment and allow them to learn at a pace that is more suited to them as an individual.

There is evidence that home schooling does have its share of success and James Conroy from Dean of the Faculty of Education at Glasgow University was quoted in the Guardian saying "research shows home-schooled children do better in all standard tests."  In the same article Dr Roland Meighan, a former professor of education at Nottingham University, says studies show the home-educated are on average two years ahead of their peers in schools in any test and in any subject.

So from a results only side there are always concerns about lack of socialisation with other pupils and becoming part of something larger.  However with the increase in bullying and worries about youth crime that seems to less of a concern these days.

Over the weekend Beanbag stormed past 200 signed up tutors and we'd just like to thank everyone for the support.  The site is growing much quicker than we expected and we have a lot more improvements planned in the coming weeks that should make the experience of using and joining Beanbag an even easier experience.

It is important for us to get your feedback as much as possible, the more the community contributes the better the site will become, so feel free to contact me or use our Get Satisfaction page to let us know what you think of Beanbag and where you'd like to see it going in the future.

Thanks again!

This is a guest post from Nicole who is spending part of her summer working here with us at Beanbag helping with tutor recruitment and various other things.

"My name is Nicole Stenner and I am 16 years of age. I have just sat my GCSE’s and now that I have finished I am currently in my first job; where I am working here at Beanbag. This is a new experience that allows me to see what the world of work is actually like.

There was a big build up to my GCSEs as I knew where I want to be in the future and how much I wanted to succeed; therefore throughout school I pushed my self as hard as possible to make sure I got the grades I wanted and never stopped at nothing less.  However putting this much pressure on myself; as I created high standards, it caused me to “change” as a person. As I became more stressed with all the pressure of getting the coursework accurate or doing extra and the revision it all built up. I started  snapping at people because I was annoyed with all the revision. And how boring it was.

People around me were telling me to calm down and not put so much pressure on myself as it’s only exams but to me they weren’t just exams they decide your future; such as if you go college, university.

When my exams finally came I spent a lot of time revising for them such as 1-2 months before to make sure I was prepared and if I didn’t;  I knew I would get paranoid and frantic as I knew I wouldn’t remember the information.  However getting my sister and mother involved with helping me with my revision to break it up it helped me to see what subjects were my strongest and weakest points then work on them.

When my exams finally finished I was relived and I knew that I had tried my hardest therefore there was no point in going over each answer; so I am now awaiting my results. My advise to upcoming GCSE students is that work hard and do the best as you can but don’t let it take over your life."

Here is something that might be of interest to any tutors reading (though many of them are probably more than aware anyway). The Association of Tutors holding its 50th (Golden) Anniversary Workshop on the 27th August at Reading Town Hall. It has sessions that look interesting to anyone trying to build up a successful tutoring practice and is bound to be a great networking opportunity.

Beanbag is very much still a work in progress and we are always looking to make improvements and value users feedback.

Not exactly a feel good education story on the front of the Guardian today.

The idea that £35billion could be spent on mediocre buildings when education in general is underfunded and failing in lots of areas is mind boggling.

With the work that people like JISC and Futurelab have being doing about what needs to be done to create learning spaces fit for the 21st Century (and thats just activity I know about off the top of my head) you'd think they would be able to get it right.

It seems alot of money to spend on buildings when perhaps more should be spent on teachers, after school programs and ICT and it makes it even harder to take if the buildings aren't really fit for use now let alone future proofed.

I mentioned the What's Next? 21 Ideas for 21st Century Learning report from Charles Leadbeater and the Innovation Unit last week but after finally sitting down to read it fully I thought I would point out one particular section that I feel is of special interest to users of Beanbag (one way or the other.)

Chapter 5 of the report focuses on the concept of peer tutoring, that is having children become tutors to other children in the same school.  This is pretty standard in the good ol' USA as I understand it but this report covers the largest experiment in peer tutoring so far in the UK which took place in 125 primary schools in Fife.

The early results are positive apparently and a major benefit has been "on the self-esteem and motivation of the child who is the tutor."

Beanbag is obviously more about traditional tutoring models than peer tutoring though we do have an interest in the concept of near-peer tutoring (not sure if thats an official term but it has a certain ring to it!) with under and post graduates becoming involved in the tutoring process, bringing with them recent experience of the curriculum and study methods and an ability to hopefully relate better to the student.  This is something we would like to explore in the future in addition to offering the best possible service to the traditional tutor community.