Beanbag

Beanbag was set-up back in 2007 to assist parents / guardians in finding face to face tutors for their children. Why - because as parents we struggled to find tutors for our children, and because we believe that this is an area where new technology solutions to old problems can make a real and lasting difference.

Our objective was always to increase the accessibility of tutoring, and as a technology business we have been thinking long and hard about other ways in which we could make this happen.

The problem as we see it, is that it's not always possible to find a tutor when you need one, particularly if you live in geographically remote areas for example. It can also be a problem finding one to one support when your child needs help with an assignment or piece of homework. Formal tutoring arrangements whilst valuable are not always the answer. Online tutoring could provide a more cost effective way of tutoring, or provide that bit of supplementary support just when it's required.

Yes there are alternatives. You can join a study programme online, e.g. themathsfactor.com, but this will not necessarily address the specific problems your children have when they need one to one support. Individual tutors sometimes offer skype (internet phone-call) based tutoring as well, but how do you know that they are who they say they are, and how does the tutor get paid?

Some of you may recall that Tutorvista.com entered the UK market in 2007, with a technology based offer providing unlimited online tutoring support by tutors based in India, but for a number of reasons this did not take off here. Why? Based on feedback from my children who used the service, there were dialect, and technology problems, this combined with low customer service levels made it unattractive to us. In spite of these issues, online tutoring is we believe a good idea, all you have to do is to see the number of online tutoring services in the USA, such as Tutor.com to understand the potential of online tutoring to address a wide variety of learning needs.

Our belief is that online tutoring would be attractive to parents in the UK, if it were delivered properly, using technology that children prefer combined with professional customer service. What if we could provide online tutoring direct to parents, using the large number of CRB / ISA checked tutors that we already have listed on Beanbag? Would this be a winner - we think so.

As I said at the beginning, the purpose of this blog is to get your views - as our customers, your opinions count. Please feel free to comment on this blog post below, or email me direct at jonellis@beanbaglearning.com.

Some of you may have seen the thought provoking BBC Panorama programme last night entitled 'are you a danger to kids'.

Now that we are rapidly approaching 2,000 UK-based tutors listed on Beanbag getting yourself noticed is becoming more important. Tutors have asked us for tips on improving their ranking in location and subject based search results.

Research by the Institute of Education, London University has analysed the performance of children with the lowest level of achievement at the end of Year One (aged six) at ten schools. Children that received one to one reading recovery support under the £10m Every Child a Reader programme found that they are now on track to reach the expected level by the end of primary school.

We have been conducting some research on how successful this website is in matching parents / clients and tutors. 

Something that caught our eye today was the news that parents in Bristol, at Brislington Enterprise College (BEC), were to be amongst the first in the country to be able to track their children's progress at school online.

Those of you that share the madness that is Twitter can find us as Tutor_Beanbag. See you there!

We are finding that some tutors are very successful in getting noticed by parents, and are receiving numerous enquiries. So how do they do it?

We at Beanbag listen closely to feedback from our tutors. Acting on this, we have created a new website dedicated to supporting tutors, with practical help and support on the business of tutoring.

We are told that in the UK almost one in five pupils aged 11 and a quarter of 14 year olds are failing to meet national targets on the three-R’s. That said, it was some reassurance that the Government would provide £138m of funding for after-school tutoring for 300,000 pupils per annum by 2010-11 in both English and Maths as part of its Making Good Progress initiative.

It came as a surprise to hear in January that the pilot (of 30,000 pupils) had failed to deliver, indeed only 3,438 children had received tuition in Maths and 3,514 in English.

So what’s the problem? Persuading existing teachers to stay behind after School seems to be the answer. Increased pay rates and conducting the sessions in School hours were suggested as solutions.

Even with these changes, it seems to me that if Schools are struggling to provide 30,000 sessions, what chance will they have in conducting 300,000 in 2010-11? We should be asking why the State Sector overlooking the thriving Private Sector.

If existing Teachers are reluctant to provide the additional tuition required, then the services provided by the large number of suitably qualified independent tutors – many of whom use this website - need to be used.

We live in hope, but failing to deliver on this promise would be a massive disappointment. 

The Evening Standard  reported in June that increasing numbers of Graduates were becoming Tutors. Some were working for established Agencies whilst others had set up their own Agencies. 

More than 1,000 schools in Britain have recorded cases of swine flu, and more than 60 per cent of infections have been in children and teenagers.

So I read with interest an article in today's Times, saying that the BBC could be forced to clear its schedules to make way for educational programming if a swine flu pandemic shuts schools, piping lessons straight into pupils’ living rooms.

Ministers had considered using the internet to teach pupils at home but the television was considered more effective as not everyone has access to broadband. Broadband usage statistics indicate that 64% of the UK population has fast internet access, so I guess television broadcasting makes more sense, although I see no reason why the programmes could not be made available on YouTube at the same time.

The BBC however are fighting against this proposal, as “taking control of the schedule would be tantamount to taking control of the BBC. It has never happened. To do so would destroy our reputation around the world as an impartial broadcaster.” Really? We are talking about educational programming here, are we not?

Maybe the BBC would like some feedback from someone who pays their License Fee every year. Would I like my children to be educated if Schools have to be closed down because of a pandemic – a resounding yes! If it means that we have to miss an episode of Cash In The Attic then so be it. My children were unavailable for comment….

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!