WHERE TO GET THE WHITE BOARD?

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Permalink Reply by Christian Stapfer on September 20, 2009 at 9:05pm

Here are a few ideas:
1. If you and your student are both running Windows you could try to use the whiteboard that is part of Windows Live Messenger. (However, judging from some really bad experience with other freely available whiteboards from Microsoft, such as NetMeeting, MSN Messenger and Windows Messenger, I fear that you might find that this whiteboard will not always be able to establish a peer-to-peer connection, because of firewall or NAT router problems.)
2. If you are using an external graphics tablet, you might try to use one of the free browser based whiteboards, such as scribblar, DimDim or www.wiziq.com. They run on both Windows and Mac OS, so that would be an advantage.
3. You could join Scott Palat's www.TutorFi.com.
4. If you are using a tablet-pc you might want to consider using Microsoft's OneNote as a shared whiteboard (however, the same caveat applies here as in my suggestion 1 as regards connection problems - also: this "whiteboard" is not free, so both you and your student would need to buy a copy of it).

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Permalink Reply by Christian Stapfer on September 28, 2009 at 12:10pm

You wrote: "they charge only a fraction of what you are charging. per hour."

Oh great! - But what fraction do they charge (typically)? - And isn't there usually a fixed charge (independent of any tutoring that you might do) that has to be paid to that tutoring company as well?

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Permalink Reply by Scott Palat on September 29, 2009 at 11:23am

I assume you a referring to an online tutoring job. What Ravi is speaking about is operating his own online tutoring business where he deals with his own clients directly.

It also sounds like you seem to think that a cheaper online tutoring service is better. This is not always true, especially if the individual tutor who operates their own online tutoring business takes the time to care by consulting the parents on an ongoing basis.

Most of the cheap online tutoring companies don't allow the tutor to call the parents and the students rarely get to work with the same tutor twice.

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Permalink Reply by Scott Palat on September 29, 2009 at 11:20am

Christian wrote some good options below. Also, there is vyew.com as another option to get you started. That's great news that you have students lined up for your online tutoring service.

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Permalink Reply by aeroramesh on September 29, 2009 at 11:55pm

can u use tablet in vyew .com portal

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Permalink Reply by Christian Stapfer on September 30, 2009 at 7:49am

You mean an external graphics tablet (i.e. one not built into the screen itself, as in a tablet-pc)?
Sure you can use such an (external) tablet (but you must first buy one, of course).
Recently I have hit upon a video by someone who uses vyew and a Wacom Bamboo tablet for online math-tutoring (see here). The part about her use of vyew with a tablet starts at 08:00. (Never mind that the lady does not have the sweetest of voices ;-) )

However, if you happen to use a tablet-pc you will surely be disappointed by how writing with your pen on the vyew whiteboard behaves and looks. This is a problem that you will encounter with all browser based whiteboards, as far as I know. (That's why I decided to write my own whiteobard...)

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Permalink Reply by Scott Palat on September 30, 2009 at 9:02am

You might be better off using a usb pen or just the mouse itself. I only tested vyew one time and that was about a year ago. I never tested it with a tablet.

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Permalink Reply by Christian Stapfer on October 3, 2009 at 9:54am

Would you recommend a particular USB pen? (There are several and I can't figure, from reading the advertisements alone, how well they would work for the purpose of writing on a whiteboard.)
Also, I am full of admiration if you can write a reasonable amount of math (i.e. something more involved than 1+1=2) with the mouse alone. - I, for one, could never do it! (Sure, I tried it once but very quickly gave up in despair. Agreed, there are people who learn to write with their feet. So, maybe, it's really only a question of how much you practice.)

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Permalink Reply by Scott Palat on October 3, 2009 at 8:06pm

Any usb pen should work fine assuming the online tutoring classroom enables it. I know that many of my tutor clients and their students prefer the usb pen, especially for higher level maths.

I agree that it's hard to write a high level math problem with the mouse alone. Practice does make perfect, but I'd still recommend the usb pen.

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Permalink Reply by Christian Stapfer on October 3, 2009 at 9:52pm

You wrote: "Any usb pen should work fine assuming the online tutoring classroom enables it." - But what does "enabling" mean here?
I once used a device quite similar to this one (NoteTaker), it was called "InkLink". Problem was that it only worked with its own special app. You could not use it to write on a whiteboard and the maker of InkLink (Seiko) refused to lay open their interface to the device. So the only way to make my students see what I wrote with an InkLink was to use desktop sharing. Which was (back then, when internet speeds were slower than what they are nowadays) not a very effective way to cooperate, to say the least.
So I wonder: If NoteTaker does what it seems to be doing, namely work as an input device for Windows Vista's ink input system, then any app that uses Vista's ink input system should work with that pen. In particular, my own whiteboard would work with that pen! Maybe I should go and buy one, just to find out whether this is true or not. (Unfortunately I never get answers to queries concerning technical details of such devices.)

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Permalink Reply by Scott Palat on October 4, 2009 at 7:23am

For example, I didn't even know that our TutorFi online classroom worked with a usb pen. Shari Nielsen, one of my partners was testing it one day and found out that our online classroom allows the use of a usb pen.

Now, we let all of our tutors know that they can use a usb pen to write more details if needed while conducting their online tutoring sessions.

I have no idea, how it works, but I guess some online classrooms have the usb pen function built in and some might need special apps to use it. I feel lucky that my online classroom has this feature enabled.

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Permalink Reply by Christian Stapfer on October 4, 2009 at 7:57am

Well, if you (or, rather, your software developer) did not have do anything special for the use of an USB pen then I am quite confident to conclude that the pen is simply acting as a mouse (as seen by an app through the operating system).
Which means: you can use an USB pen with any app that works with a mouse. No "enabling" in any deep sense is required. But that also means that one gets a relatively low quality mouse trace as input from an USB pen, and of course no pressure information.

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