Trasncript from Tutoring Online: Closer to the Real Thing April 10th, 2018 SECRLA Webinar, presented by Lucy MadDonald, M.A, M.A. Follow up on this Webinar: Dr. Ethel Berksteiner: eyberksteiner@savannahtech.edu [0:00:00] Lucy McDonald: I'm happy to share with you what was in the past, but mostly what's in the future. So, if you're all ready to go, were going to go. The first thing I was so excited to have is two-way video. It's been a long time coming. We get two-way audio before we get two-way video. So, what if your tutors could see and talk to their tutees online, have something like their picture here. And, what if it was made easier, so that the video icon is right next to their picture. You can turn it on, you can turn it off; the audio icon is right next to it as well. You can turn on the audio, you can turn off the audio. We'll talk about why you might wanna do some of these things. And it's a comfortable smile from your tutor or indeed your tutee, as you say, invite someone, invite them to your tutoring session. So, reasons for the tutee camera to be on. One of the questions I'm usually asked is, "Did you read your text book?" The audio answer is always, "Yes." The video answer is always, scroll your eyes towards the ceiling, shrug your shoulders, "Uh, maybe." So, I like to be able to see my tutees. I also want to observe and monitor anxiety, especially in math. Sometimes students come in and you're working away with them on a math problem, all of a sudden they're zoned out. Not because of the math, but because they're so nervous. So, I need to watch for that and either slow down or back up or take another tack, and I can only do that if I can see them. Some schools also want to check student ID and so video is a good way to do that. And sometimes I find that I'm talking to myself because the student left the room. So, I like to have my tutees video camera on, but sometimes they wanna turn it off to save bandwidth, or for my Native American students who do not like to have their image on the Web. I understand that. There's added benefits for audio. Students can not only show their work, but they can talk about how they did it. And, it's amazing ways that they have of how they did it, and get off track so easily. And, if they can just tell me, then it's easier to redirect. So, there's benefits for having audio two-way. And students have a difficulty in math anxiety, again this happens to you in a session. I don't know why, I just switch languages, since I went to bilingual school. I speak two, three languages, and talked about the major concept, and all of a sudden the math anxiety went away, because all they needed was confidence in explanation of the major concept in their own language. That's all they need. They could come back and work on English afterwards, but the math anxiety disappears. So, knowing that, it has been helpful to have audio. ESL students get more practice that's certainly helpful, they need more practice, more audio practice, and students in the Tutoring Center need to use the language of the subject area, so when they get back to their lecture, they'll recognize the vocabulary of the subject area. And, foreign language students may practice with students from other countries. How wonderful is that? What if students didn't have to type everything? Those of us who've been tutoring online for a long time, doing discussion forums, typing back and then somebody come back later and type back to us, you know, it would be nice not have to do that all the time. But the problem is you need the tools to do mind mapping, to draw circles, to draw lines. You need to have tools handy, and this is what this screenshot shows you, is that you have video capabilities at the top of the screen. You're not seeing students because I don't have permission to use students' pictures, but the students are gonna appear in a window right on top of the video window. Underneath that you'll have more pages to write on. And then you have some tools, and those tools will change depending on what your requests are, but right here they show, you can have different size lines, you can draw circles or point to what you want to address. But they're handy, you don't have to go to another program to find them. It's nice to have them handy all in one little package. So, that is available. If it's not available on the software that you're using you might ask, "Can I have that?" Now with two-way video and two-way audio, what is missing? Skype has two-way video and audio and it's free. But it has no whiteboard, nowhere to write, nowhere to draw, nowhere to put the math calculations put, nowhere for graph paper. And, those of you who have tried Skype to tutor, the first things you try to do is students try to hold up their work for the camera, for the tutors to see. Very awkward, and very hard to see, and very frustrating. So, let's summarize the environment that we need. What is it that we need for tutoring online, that would make our life much easier. Well, we would like to have two-way video, we would like to have two-way audio, and we would like to have a whiteboard. Now, in this image you see black instead of a white board, but that black indicates the whole space for you to use. And, also you can have information within a box, and this tutor has nicely lined it up, and a gold box. And, I'm not sure that you can see the background here, but she is using a grid. And so, you can use different color backgrounds, you can use white, she didn't use white because the graph paper is white, so she has used the black background. But you can also use one with the grid so you can line up neatly and those of us who are still writing with the mouse can kind of get a straight line. And what you see here is a math problem in white, and you see a blue arrow talking about how this goes on this graph someplace, and you see a blue equation underneath it. Now, evidently this tutor decided blue was the tutor color. And so when you see the line on the graph, and it's blue, we know the tutor put the line on the graph. But when you see the red, then that's the tutee's work there. So, you have all of them in one place, the pieces of the puzzle that you need. And you'll notice that underneath the picture you have colored circles, so you can have different colors. You can have highlighted different size circles, you now got triangles and squares. You get different tools that you
can put up there for everybody to access and use. So, this is where we gonna take our break here and see if we have any questions from the chat that I need to address at this moment. So, Stacey do we have any chat questions? [0:09:40] Speaker 2: Nothing pending. [0:09:41] Lucy McDonald: Nothing pending? Okay guys, but feel free to post in there, and know that we will double-check periodically to see where we're at. All right. Now, how long does it take a tutoring session to get started? Once you're here you've got your tools, you've got your two-way audio, you've got your two-way video, you've got your whiteboard. How long does it take to get going? Well there's the 20-minute way, which I will illustrate, and there's the four-minute way. So let's talk about the 20-minute way. The 20 minute way goes like this. The tutee contacts me and says, "I need help with math." I say, "Very good. What math?" "Oh intermediate algebra." "Who's your Professor?" "Dr. Barber." "Okay. What book is he using? What text book?" "Bittinger's Intermediate Algebra." "Okay. What page is it on?" "Page 38." "All right. And, what number or problem?" "13." "Okay." So I get my book out, and I go and I look up page 38, and I look up number 13. And I say, "Oh, that's the one with braces?" And the student says, "No. It had... " And I say, "Well, does it have parentheses?" "No, it's just like an equation." At that point I realize I missed a step. And the step I missed was asking, "What edition of the text book are you using?" So, evidently I'm on the wrong edition and the student is on a different edition and now we have to start over. This is the 20-minute way, because we are now 20 minutes into a tutoring session and we haven't done anything yet. And so, both the student and I look like this girl in the picture, so frustrated. Oh, goodness sakes! So, wouldn't you like to be a four minute way and, you know, fast at getting started, and this is the revolutionary, the aha technology for me. When I saw this I thought, "Oh boy, this is what I need". This is the four-minute way. Supposing all you needed to do, is to take your cell phone out and take a picture of the problem. We don't need to know the edition of the text book, we don't need to know the author of the text book, we don't need to know the name of the text book. We just need the problem that you want to work with. Well, this is now. Take a photo with your cellphone and then text it to. Now, this my usual. There's a telephone number there. A regular area code and seven digit number, but since this is a computer-generated, I better take it out or everybody's gonna be calling this fake number. Just know that a telephone number will appear for you to text your photo to it. And, wait 20 seconds, that's not too long, and then you'll get a reply asking for a code. And again the code is gonna be listed, I think it's a six digit code, and that's the code you will type in. It's given to you and all you have to do is wait. And it may take a minute or two. And your photo of the problem that you texted will be... There you go. The photo that you texted will show up on the whiteboard. I think texted is a word now. So, the problem that you wanna work on will show up on the whiteboard in your tutoring session, for both the tutee and the tutor. That's the four-minute way, and besides which then a miracle happens. Mostly when we get photos on the white board we can point to something, but we can't. When a miracle happens, you can write and draw on top of the image itself. And when I found that out, I said, "This is what we need." Because this not only helps in math, think about it, we gonna talk about it in a minute, it also helps in the writing and looking at papers. So, now this shows you the problem in white, this is the little, tiny problem that the tutee sent to the white board. Now, this tutor chose not to write on the problem itself. If it were me, I'd be highlighting x squared as something they needed to pay attention to, but that's alright. Just know that you can write on that photo that you sent. So, what's showing here is your tutoring session, and the tutor in blue working through the problem. And, then the line that is on the graph is not in blue, and the reason for that is, the tutor asked the tutee to draw the line, and that's red, and the tutee's color is red. So, you can easily separate who's doing what or who's working where. So, lets see if we have any other questions from the chat. Do we have any- Okay. What if tutors could write or circle concepts on students' writing papers? Now, writing is my field, but the last thing I wanna see is corrected word documents. Corrected by some other person and the students coming back to my desk, because that means it did not pass go, did not go through the student's head, and the students didn't learn anything about writing. Somebody's just doing copy editing. I want to have a "real talk", a real Tutoring Center experience with my writing students. So, usually it begins with something like, "Where is your topic sentence?" Well, all the students have to do is to take a photo of the first paragraph of their draft and text it to the whiteboard, so that we can both talk about it. And, believe it or not, "Where is your topic sentence?" Is sometimes a treasure hunt, and they'll circle, "Is it this one?" "No." "Is it this one?" "No." And so, we have to have a discussion on what is a topic sentence. Where did you hide it? Did you even write a topic sentence? Is it just inferred or implied? And this is what is part of a writing-centered conversation in the learning process. If we can get past the topic sentence, which is wonderful, if that happens the first session. Then the next question is, "Where is your thesis statement?" For many students they don't know what that means. They got a topic sentence, "What more do you want?" I say, "I want your topic sentence plus the answer to the question 'so what'." That's your thesis statement. So that's another discussion that we have to go through, but we can do that auditory, with circles and lines, and we don't come out with a copyrighted word document. We come out with a document that students can take home and work on putting together a topic sentence. Work together on putting together a thesis sentence, and come back and see how they're doing in their Tutoring Center. So, tutoring online is not just for math alone. Although, as an English major I really like,
what I call, visual math. So, there are tools now, so you can show math problems like the graphing calculator. Now this comes from desmos.com. It's very, very tiny, so I'll spell it. It's D-E-S-M-O-S, desmos.com. That's a website where you can go and get this graphing calculator. So, if you're using something like Blackboard or Zoom or Adobe Connect, you can still use this graphing calculator. Oh, how fun is that. And, you can change the parabola, and as you change this the math appears on the left. Oh, my! It's like magic math. Those of you who are left-brained, you can do the math, and then the graph will change. It is a wonderful tool. An exploratory tool. And it's readily available for use for free at desmos.com or in other places where you'll see in a minute. Now we have a question about how many students can be in GoBoard at the same time. Four plus the tutor can be in GoBoard at the same time, but there are opportunities, which we'll talk about later. And is there a time limit? No. There's no time limit. So, you can have Speedy Gonzales go in and quick, come out, or you can have students who get their time that they need for whatever subject they're working on. And they're not cut off in the middle, which is so frustrating. All right. Thanks for those questions folks. Now, the next thing is, many of us wear different hats and in Tutoring Center we have different topics and different subjects. So, sometimes you have to go to the maths section, or you have to go to the science tutors, or you have to go to the language tutors, or you have to go to the writing center. Be kind of nice for tutoring online of we could have these things together. So, here is a tool, customized tutoring tools for multiple subjects. So, just the general one that I'm showing you has different shapes to use, different exports... Not different exports, but a way to export your work, the background grid, image files. The image files that you use to get the photo texted, the graphing calculator is here, I don't have to go out desmos every time, its right on my file cabinet menu, and keyboard shortcuts for those of you who can remember what they are. And tutors who are in one subject area get used to remembering them, ones they use most frequently. Look at this. You can have math special tools, like a square root. I am tired drawing square roots with my mouse. So, you can have symbols that you can just click on and put in your equation like braces. Lord, it's very hard for me to draw braces. But I can click on the symbol and stick it in. Chemistry tools with the rounded arrow, physics tools and business tools like insert table. I have these all handy on a menu that I can just click on and go and get the tool that I need. Makes it much easier for tutoring online. To have things coordinated and pulled together. Now, what if students and tutors had ready access to a number line? This came as a request, and when you think of it originally, but oh boy, it's been one of the most popular things to have a number line. And, this is just underneath the tutor's picture. Here's your number line and here's more math tools that you might be interested in underneath that. Another handy little dandy thing. What if both tutors and students could have different colored pens. I am very color coordinated, and so all of my subjects have a different color, and my file cabinet folders go with it, and my folders online go with it. I'm into color. But many times when we began tutoring online, it was so confusing to know what was the tutor's example and what was the student's answer because it was all the same color, all the same font, all the same text. Now we can separate, and so when we export a session, we know whose example is the tutor's and what was the student question. I also like to use the laser pointer. Especially when we come to comma splices. I don't wanna be marking over comma splices. I'll do that the first time, to highlight a comma splice. Where are you commas? Is it a comma splice? We have to have a discussion about that sometimes. And then I say, "Okay, I'm just gonna use the laser pointer." Laser pointer doesn't leave a trail. It just shows you, for the time being, what we're going to talk about. And so, it's like a quiz, all right, what's this? What's this? What's this? Is this a comma splice, is this not a comma splice? Is this a whole sentence for those of you who're doing grammar and basic English. So, it's just another tool, instead of an arrow. It's nice to be able to have powers already drawn for you. I want this little one, I want this big one, I want this one go to the right, I want this one to go to the left. Handy tools so we can focus on tutoring and the subject at hand. Now, back to the beginning. For those of you who have started with various platforms. One of the things... It would be nice if all we had to do is get on the Web. We wouldn't have to worry anymore, do you have a Mac or do you have a PC, or do we need to download a program? I mean when you get online for this presentation, Zoom, you need it to download certain things. It's one thing for tutors and for faculty and for your university to do that, but it's another thing for students to have to that. And, sometimes I have spent the whole first week of trying to get students online where they're supposed to be. Since, I've been teaching online for a long time. I have offered students the backup the safety net of a Saturday get-together face-to-face. If you did not make it online during the first week, you have the opportunity to come in for three hours with me and we'll get you online, and get all your work done for the first week. So that you can then begin the second week with everyone else, and I've actually had students and tutees drive eight hours one-way to do that. With just, but that's what they needed to do because it was so complicated and they felt so alone when they're 500 miles out in the desert in the middle of Oregon, and nobody to help them. So, they thought they would drive to campus, and we would get them going. But supposing you didn't have to do that. How wonderful would that be? Supposing all we had to do was hop on the Web and go right into the tutoring session. So, I guess this is the thing that's been so exciting for me. Is just hop on the Web, invite your tutor, or tutor invite your tutee to have a video chat and go. Just, not worry about the technology. Just be able to go, and the students who are doing this, are the athletes who're on the road at a meet, and need back up tutoring, have the opportunity to do this. Students who
are at home, mothers with small children, dads with small children, people in the service. Just hop on the Web and go. It would be so wonderful. You think you could use some of these things in your tutoring sessions? What if it were easy to use. Please, please make it easy to use and best of all, make it fit my budget. I don't know about your budget, but my budget says free is in my budget. How would you use these concepts in tutoring online? Now, I have shown you several different concepts. Those of you who are comparing various programs to use. These are the questions we should be asking from the tutoring's perspective. "What tutoring elements do you have in your program, in your platform that are gonna help me in tutoring?" So, it's kind of a little checklist and I wanted you to know what is available now. We've got future things to ask for. We have more questions coming up. But what is available now, and these are some of the things available now. But the next thing is, I want them all in one place. And so, there is a place, they have them all in one place and that's called GoBoard. So, that's all of these elements are available on GoBoard.com. Some of you may be playing with that already. Some of you may be looking at what you're going to do next. Some of us don't like to talk and play at the same time that's already available. But, what if this were just the beginning because now I know you got lots of other questions. Like you're looking for data collection, you want access to an administrative panel. You want recording tutoring sessions for the future. You want group tutoring and more. Those we're not going to talk about today because I want you to make your list, and in the future we gonna come up and have a session, I hope, on what is your list of questions? And we're gonna take questions in a little bit here, so that we can see where we are at. Questions on what we have available now and what more questions we might have available later. If you're interested in inquiring about our online tutoring platform that tracks hours for your students and tutors, contact Stacey@tutormatchingservice.com for inquiry. She's here with me today watching the chat for me and she'd be happy to answer any of your questions. I want you to know that tutoring online is alive and well, and now we have a chance to go and try things out. And that we need to build a community to talk about these things. I had a university contact me and say they've got this big grant and they've got tutoring online and nobody comes. And I thought, "Whoa! What do you mean nobody comes?" And so, I went to look. Well nobody comes because their tutoring online was only available 9 AM in the morning. Well, my students are in class at 9 AM in the morning, they're not in the learning center at 9 AM in the morning, and evidently that had skipped their frame of reference. So, we need to find out, what works best, what hours works best. How we're going to manage this and have a conversation amongst ourselves to know what it is we need to ask for. And guess what? It might come someday. Now do we have any other questions from the chat. [0:35:08] Speaker 2: We've been answering them along the way. Lots of great questions though about platforms, ipads, which the answer is yes. And, screen share and group tutoring of four students plus the tutor, and storage of sessions being available later. And, yeah. So, it's been lots of great questions. [0:35:34] Lucy McDonald: Oh, good. Keep the questions coming because that's how we get solutions offered to us and the tech follows our way. Instead of the other way around where we're trying to follow tech that doesn't provide the resources that we need, and we're trying to put that square peg into the circle. [0:35:58] Speaker 2: We also have a question, "How can we contact Lucy?" Always was a great question. [0:36:03] Lucy McDonald: Always a great question. Okay. Lucy is easy to contact. Lucy is lucy@lucyonline.com. Since I've retired from college I am at lucy@lucyonline.com, and my students may know me not as Lucy McDonald. I'm known from the West Coast as Lucy McDonald because I was in Oregon for 30 years and I am 110 years old. But students on the East Coast know me as, "Oh, that's the how to study lady." So, I have a website called, howtostudy.org, which is very beneficial for your students since the second half is arranged by subject area. So, students don't need time management, they tell me, because their mother taught them how to that. It's just that they can't get their papers or lab reports done on time. So the second half of my site is how to write a lab report for biology, how to study for biology test, how to study for organic chem, etc. So, Howtostudy.org, and I'm happy to answer questions offline on that particular topic. And, I'm online most of the time folks, you can get me even when I'm in Australia visiting my grandchildren. So, let me just go down here to here's the what ifs and... We have plenty of time. So, we can... If you wanna follow up just on the webinar that the Southeast CRLA has sponsored, that's this webinar. You'd follow up with Ethel Berksteiner, and I've left her email here. If you wanted GoBoard pro then this is Stacey's number here too. Her telephone number and her email address. And so, I wanted to make sure that you had contact information and that we would have follow-up. You're going to receive a survey tomorrow already, and so you'll have more ways to give input on what you have heard here. I have not seen the list of colleges and universities yet, so I don't know where everybody is coming from. I don't know how many community colleges we have here or how many colleges, but when
we talk, I hope you'll tell me where you're from and we can see who else is available. You'll also be receiving email of the PowerPoint presentation. So, if you wanna share this with others or you wanna go back. Sometimes I get so busy listening I don't have notes and we didn't send out a handout ahead of time for you to take notes on, so that will be sent out for you. A link to that. The Q&A, the questions and answers all will also be sent after that. And if you just like a recording of what we've done today, that will also be sent out to you. So, it doesn't stop here folks. It continues and I hope that the professional development started here will continue to continue. Because, I don't know about you, but I never think of the one question during the session. I always get back to my desk and say, "Oh, why didn't I ask that question?" And I believe in the community, I believe that we learn from each other. Some things will work for me, but other things that may work for you, if I could know about it, I could maybe just tweak it and I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel all over again. So it's important to continue the conversation along the subject and find out what various people are doing, how it works for them, how it doesn't work for them is just as important. I have made so many mistakes just ask me, you don't have to do those I already made them. This is very important that we continue the conversation along these lines. As I said earlier, we still need more practice in this area. [0:41:22] Speaker 2: We've opened it up where if people would like to unmute their microphones for a closing comment or questions. We always like to be ahead of schedule, which we are, which is great, but if anyone would like to, on the bottom left of their screen, they just hover over the video a little "unmute the mic" button pops up, and they can do so if they'd like to ask a question. [0:41:49] Lucy McDonald: Let's see who's brave. Some of you I've talked to before, some of you know me from various CRLA presentations and made presentations. So, this is your chance to get customized answers for the questions that you may need answering for, or some of us don't know. We're just saying, "Oh, I think that this is something that I need to do, but I don't know what it is I need to do". This is the forum to raise your questions. When I started teaching it took me, online, it took me three years to get permission to teach online, because I didn't have the research data. Well hello, it was 1989. There was no research data. So I, in frustration said, "I have done all the dry land swim training I can do, you need to throw me in the pool and I'll show you that this stuff does work." But it was most frustrating. Now I'm getting calls from people saying, "My Dean said I will do this or my president said I will do this. How? What am I going to do? I don't even know where to start". This is one place to start. These are questions that you can research, that will help you have a little check list. "Can you do this? Can you do that? Adobe Connect, can you do this?" "Yes." "How complicated is it to do this?" Oh oh, that's the second question you need to ask. [0:43:46] Speaker 2: We have a comment from C.C Edwards just saying, "Thank you so much for this insightful webinar. Thank you for leading the way. [0:43:52] Lucy McDonald: Oh, you're very welcome. For those of you who know learning styles, etc. And whether we're native or pioneers, I'm a discoverer. I'm out there I like to discover new things and so that's very helpful for me. And now I find my grand children are leading the way. My grandchildren are in elementary school, age 10 and 12. The total school is ipads. And so, they're teaching me usage of the ipad in education and in taking video of their dance lessons and their cricket lessons. So, I am learning, and one of the things that I've learnt is the power of video. We need to do more videos. Short, not humongous big things, but short, and maybe we could share quadratic equation explanations in videos. So that poor tutors wouldn't have to explain that all day long in a nice pleasant smiley voice. If others wanna do a webinar for SECRLA, please let us know. It does not have to be along the lines of tutoring online, but if there's a topic that you would be interested in presenting on. You know that we are willing to provide the tech support that you need. We can be the hand holders. He is holding my hand, so that can make it easy for you. One of the problems we're having in the South East is that our area is very broad and Florida goes a long way South. I happen to be lucky I live in Sarasota, just three miles down 75 from Gainesville, so it's easy for me to get here. But it's much more difficult for me to get to Savannah, South Carolina. So, many of us are now looking at ways to share information that is easier than flying and spending all our budget on going from conference to conference. We're bringing the conference to you at a reasonable budget fee, and are happy to do that and this is one of our first ones that we've done it, and we have more people here than we would have had at a conference, face-to-face. And we're very happy to do that. [0:47:04] Speaker 2: We have our comment from Lynn Schmidt saying, "Thanks, looking forward to learning more in the future." [0:47:09]
Lucy McDonald: Great. Thanks Lynn. And, what we need from you Lynn, and from other people is more, learning more about what, what directions would you like to go next? Where are your priorities for professional development in our field next. And just a little ad for CRLA in the fall it's gonna be in Albuquerque. I'm excited about going to Albuquerque, but for many of you, some of that's close, some of that's not so close. But we will also be able to talk about and show various universities using tutoring online. Any you'll get a chance to talk to them about how it's working for them and what they're doing in their fields. So CRLA is going to be in October this year, which is a change, and in Albuquerque. So, we would love to see folks out there as well. So we're coming in 10 minutes early. We can wrap up now and you can go have coffee. So, thank you everyone for attending and I promise to follow up with you personally, as well as we're gonna follow up with where the links are to this session and the questions and answers. [0:48:45] Speaker 2: And Anna Mac, close this out well saying, "Thank you so much for providing this wonderful learning opportunity, looking forward to the next one." [0:48:52] Lucy McDonald: Great. Thank you Anna Mac. Signing out for now. [0:48:59] Speaker 2: Bye everyone.