How To Manage Your Students Effectively?

We always hear stories about tutors being late for lessons, tutors/parents forgotten about the number of lessons conducted for the month, tutors having a difficult time chasing payment from parents etc.

Many tutors use their mobile phones’ in-built calendar to keep track of the lessons. Those who are more serious about tuition tend to use a diary/notebook to keep track.

For part-time tutors, undergraduate tutors or full-time tutors with more than 5 students, pen & paper may not be the best solution.

We came across an online application built for tutors to manage their students. There is even an iphone app for tutors to access the data anywhere.

Even though the application is built for music teachers, we have found out that it works perfectly fine for home tutors. The extra features for music teachers can be ignored. It is called Music Teacher Helper.

The best deal is that there is a forever free plan for you to use as long as you have no more than 5 students.

The Free Plan includes features (which home tutors can use):

• Live Calendar
• Automatic Lesson Reminders
• Automatic Invoicing
• Make-up Lessons 
• Track Lesson Progress
• Lending Library
• Attendance Report
• Mass E-mail Students
• Student Contact Information
• Automatic Birthday Greeting
• Student and Parent Access
• Track Income and Expenses
• Invoice History
• Your own professional studio website
• & more

 We feel that out of all the features above, home tutors can really benefit from using the Live Calendar to schedule all lessons and make-up lessons. Tutors can use the mobile app to view the calendar. The tracking of lessons and payment will also provide quite a bit of convenience.

For the free plan, you can sign up at Music Teacher Helper.

Do let us know if it works for you.

Work with Numbers up to 10 Millions by age 9.

English state schools in UK are taking actions to toughen up their standards in order to compete with international advance education systems such as Singapore.

A draft mathematics curriculum suggests that students at the age of nine will have to know all their time tables up to 12×12 and be able to work with numbers up to 10 million by the end of the primary education. Currently, students only need to know up to 10×10 and work with numbers below 1,000 by age 11. This is quite a challenge for future students. If students nowadays think that the current education system is tough to excel in, think again.

Related articles

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• In Math You Have to Remember, In Other Subjects You Can Think About It (maa.org)

Great Teachers Inspire. Cool Teachers Build Apps.

We seldom use this two words in a single sentence; Teacher and Apps.

High school English teacher Jeff Scheur from Chicago has decided to build one called NoRedInk that can be used to teach grammer skills.

NoRedInk

This app do not show multiple-choice quiz but allow student to manipulate punctuation and the words by themselves. Teachers can also use the app to monitor the students’ progress in a class.

Teacher Progress Page

If you are a home tutor teaching english, you may want to consider this interesting tool.

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Should You Get Your Degree In Singapore? Look At This Table Before Deciding.

Singapore’s universities were ranked quite well by Britain’s Times Higher Education magazine. With an improvement from the previous ranking, it seems that Singapore will be able to convince many foreign students to further their studies here.

The magazine compiled its World Reputation Ranking by asking 17,554 experienced academics in 137 countries to rate universities in two areas: research and teaching.

Top universities
1. Harvard University
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3. University of Cambridge
4. Stanford University
5. University of California, Berkeley
6. University of Oxford
7. Princeton University
8. University of Tokyo
9. University of California, Los Angeles
10. Yale University
11. California Institute of Technology
12. University of Michigan
13. Imperial College London
14. University of Chicago
15. Columbia University
16. Cornell University
16. University of Toronto
18. Johns Hopkins University
19. University of Pennsylvania
20. Kyoto University
21. University College London
22. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Z�rich
23. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
23. National University of Singapore
81-90. Nanyang Technological University

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Buying The New iPad For School? Lets See How It Might Help Your Studies.

Many students are using various form of technologies to assist their learning. We have discussed about how students utilised smart phones to study in our previous post. Now, you can further understand the future of textbooks by looking at the infograph below. For home tutors who are always thinking of ways to make teaching easier, you can refer to the infograph too.

How Higher Education Is Going Digital

Related articles

• What We Lose in a Digital Age (its-serendipity.com)
• What the iPad Price Cut Means for Your Kids (fool.com)
• Bookstream–New Cloud-based Library Delivers eBooks to Students’ iPads, Smartphones, and Laptops (prweb.com)

These Math Questions are like… Oh My God!

It is normal to come across mathematics questions which are difficult to solve. But it is rare to see one that is horrifying.

Horrible Math Question

Here are some of the horrible and disgusting questions that you might ever seen in your life…

• Tilda Tiger had many hungry children to feed on Thanksgiving Day. She caught 169 Africans, 526 Americans and 196 Indians. She then put the people equally into 9 enormous ovens to bake. How many desperate people were in each oven?
• Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how many would each slave pick?
• If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?

Luckily these questions are from the States. But let us not be complacent and not monitor our children’s Math homework.

What will you do if you see these kind of questions popping up in your child’s worksheet?

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Use Smartphones to Help You Study More Efficiently.

Use smartphone to study more efficiently? The smartphone penetration rate in Singapore is extremely high especially among the college students. How do students really use their smartphones? Look at the inforgraph below for some interesting facts. Does those facts resemble your lifestyle?

Via: STUDYBLUE.com

Related articles

• Students Who Study on Smartphones Are Better Prepared for Class (prweb.com)
• Students with Smartphones Study More (pcworld.com)
• Study: Students with smartphones study more often (digitaltrends.com)

College Students May Not Be Learning Enough?

Studies in USA have found out that a significant number of college students are not smarter after studying for 3 to 4 years.

The authors of We’re Losing Our Minds were interviewed by Inside Higher Ed:

There’s no question that high costs are a problem. But low value is a bigger problem. No matter what the cost is, higher education is overpriced if it fails to deliver on its most basic promise: learning. Value is low when, as the research shows, too many of our college graduates are not prepared to think critically and creatively, speak and write clearly, solve problems, comprehend complex issues, accept responsibility and accountability, take the perspective of others, or meet the expectations of employers.

Thinking of undergraduate degrees as commodities — tickets to a job — has led students, parents, institutions of higher education, governing boards, and state and federal officials to focus on efficiency, rather than efficacy. Attempts to improve efficiency — to produce more graduates with more degrees at lower cost — have created misguided policy “fixes” and supported demands for a particular kind of accountability that can be measured by simplistic indicators like cost and retention.

We are facing a national crisis in higher learning, or, rather, in the lack thereof. Improving efficiency and lowering costs are just not enough; we need to improve value. And we can only improve value by increasing the quality and quantity of learning in college. We wrote our book to help catalyze a national discussion on this issue — and with the hope that the academy will rise to the occasion and avoid the imposition of “solutions” from outside higher education.

Let us hope this will not be the trend in Singapore or has it already been the case? Is the white piece of rolled-up-high-quality-paper just another ticket to a job? This leads us to more questions about the increasing number of university in Singapore and the emerging problems from local universities. There are more graduates but do they still command the same level of respect from people around them compared to perhaps 40 years ago?

An increasing expensive college degree may be justified if there are value and quality, and not only a white piece of rolled-up-high-quality-paper with a red ribbon.

If you are currently an undergraduate, what do you think?

*The above article has been heavily influenced by this article :

MORE EXPERTS SAY COLLEGE STUDENTS AREN’T LEARNING ENOUGH

Related articles

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It’s Never So Simple To Find A Home Tutor. Ideal Tuition Is Now Open For Business!

There are numerous tuition agencies in Singapore. Most of them offer at least a website for students/parents to submit a tutor request form. Tutors can normally register with these agencies by submitting an online application form too. These are the basic features which all tuition agencies offer. However, there a couple more competitive agencies’ websites which offer more features such as:

• Tutor Database – to search for tutors
• Tutor Comparison Tool – to compare selected tutors side-by-side
• Assignment Database – to search for tuition assignments

The Brand New Ideal Tuition offers all the features above to ensure the best online user experience for everyone. On top of that, Ideal Tuition also hopes to further enrich the user experience with powerful tools to cut down the amount of time required for students to find tutors vice-versa. Want to know more about how to save time? Watch this short introduction video Now!

Once again, Ideal Tuition Had Officially Launched on 1st Feb 2012! Do Join Us here!

Ideal Tuition's Logo

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A Moment Of Laughter Before Our Own Spelling Bees. (Videos)

Spelling can be a very interesting thing to do. It makes people laugh, faint and even jumping with joy! Here are some funny videos of students competing on a National Spelling Bee competition. Watch these hilarious videos here. if you have some time to spare. If not, you can just watch one the video below. Enjoy.

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