The Beanbag Blog

The importance of tutors

2008-10-31 13:19:51 UTC

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.

Busy Beanbaggers..

2008-10-15 12:05:31 UTC

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

Tuition aid for struggling pupils

2008-09-24 10:07:04 UTC

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