Skpe Tutor resources (and costs)

[sara24bella]

We live overseas, and I would like to find a tutor to help my son with his English (grammar) and math for maybe 1 hour per week. We've loosely tried on-line sites and curriculum, but I don't have the experience, discipline or "oomph" to keep him motivated. I would like to give a formal tutor a try. I found one person online, but she was $70 an hour- is that normal?? Does anyone have any resources for skype tutors for kids, and also how much should we expect to pay? Thank you!

[puzzlepeace]

Tutoring costs tend to be very regional.  On the East Coast of the US you can anticipate paying $50-100 an hour depending on age of student and subject material as well as the tutor's experience.  No experience with Skype tutoring beyond guitar lessons though.
 

[moominmamma]

No experience with tutors, but last year my dd (then 17) was living away from home and doing pre-Calc textbook-based course, and she occasionally needed help from someone. The course was intended to be done in an "independent study classroom" with a teacher available, but she didn't have that real-life contact, so we had to come up with other solutions.

The thing about Skype alone is that it is very awkward for details of written work. If your computer has a detached webcam you can add task lighting and use something like a sharpie to give very high contrast of your written work, but even with this, there's a lot of confusion about "No, on the second line, where you wrote the negative two as an exponent, beside the sigma-y-plus-two, that negative two, no the other one, one line up...." I think that some of this would be problematic even at much earlier levels of math. It's so much easier to show someone visually on their own work: "The digit in the tens place, this 4 here, you have to multiply it by each of these digits up here." 

Anyway, this is just my way of saying that you may find that Skype is not the ideal tool for anything that involves paperwork. What we ended up using was a shared virtual whiteboard plus speakerphone. We had each others' numbers added as free long distance favorites, and then we could talk for free. Then we used a virtual whiteboard. In our case we used freeware called Coccinella which was slightly fussy to set up, but worked cross-platform between Mac and PC. There are probably better apps out there, particularly if you and the tutor are both on the same platform.

Anyway, dd and I would each choose a colour, and we could draw on the same virtual whiteboard using our respective colours of pen, and talk at the same time. She'd write out a problem and show me how she worked it, and tell me where she got stuck, or what she was confused about, and I could see her steps in real time, clearly, and make suggestions and show her exactly where she'd gone astray or what I'd do next to solve it. 

Miranda

[sara24bella]

h! This is great information- Thank you!  When/If I DO find a tutor- I'll def keep the white board idea in mind...

For what its worth, I found today this resource: http://www.learnbycam.com/

I've just sent inquiry messages, but as soon as I hear back, I'll post here in case anyone else is looking for the same...

[jbkaminski]

I would keep looking. I personally tutor kids in reading, which is a very specific area and charge $50 an hour. If you have a middle schooler or above khan academy is free and a fantastic resource for math.