Why Online Tutoring?
Is tutoring online effective?
As our whole team has recently been required to shift to tutoring online, many of our clients and even tutors were skeptical that it would be as effective as in person tutoring. We have made quick believers of everyone! With all the technology that is at our disposal, the transition has gone very well.
Online tutoring has been around on our team for a long time. There were already many benefits to online tutoring, even before COVID-19.
When COVID-19 forced our daughter's school to close we were able to instantly transition to online video tutoring sessions, which have been every bit as effective as the in-person sessions. Given all of the disruption caused by the pandemic, it's been so nice to provide our daughter some educational continuity and it's wonderful to see her continue to make excellent progress even under these challenging circumstances. We couldn't be more pleased with Chicago Home Tutor!”
— Penny, CHT Parent
Benefits of Online Tutoring
You can get the absolute best match for your student of our team of over 100 tutors! For in person tutoring, we’re limited to our best match within a couple mile radius of your home. There are no limits to making an amazing match for online tutoring!
Online tutoring opens up scheduling options.
Parents have sometimes requested 30 or 45 minute sessions, due to focusing capacity of their student or budget concerns. When we have to factor in a commute, we require that sessions are at least an hour. With online tutoring, we are able to more flexibly schedule.
Our tutors are in high demand and precious windows in their schedule are used with commuting. We are able to open up more scheduling possibilities with online tutoring.
You don’t have to clean your house first! Joking aside, having another person in the house can be more disruptive to your routine. Having us work with your student online allows us to provide highly specialized services while your family continues with business as usual.
You can record tutoring sessions for review and repeated practice. If you have a young student who needs a lot of repetition or an older student who may need to review how we solved a math problem during the session, we can record the session so your student and family can review as needed!
Need even more reasons to try online tutoring?
Even before COVID-19, online tutoring was a compelling choice for many reasons. Now that COVID-19 is here, there are even more reasons to have tutoring online.
We have no idea how long we’ll be out of school. It seems we will be out at least through April 2020, but many schools across the country are calling off school for the rest of the year. Tutoring will allow your student to continue getting personalized academic instruction, no matter how long this lasts.
Maintain student progress. Many of our students were getting specialized support at school in the form of small group instruction, Title I services, and Individualized Education Plan (IEP) goals. Most of the services have stopped. We can review the school plans and any relevant background and goals, and jump in and continue to work on those specialized and necessary academic goals.
Stay sane and give your new co-workers a job to keep them occupied. We’ve all seen the threads traveling around our social media feeds about the behaviors of our new “co-workers” (our kids!). Tutoring can provide some structure to the day while also giving you some peace of mind about the state of your students’ academics.
Executive Functioning and Homework support. If your student had trouble completing homework and classes when they were meeting with teachers every day, they’re likely having even more trouble now. It is easy to provide executive functioning and homework support online! For example, your student can log-in to their school portal online, share their screen, and off we go to plan and organize together! Collaboration tools like shared calendars, shared documents and organization tools like Google Keep make executive functioning and homework support a natural candidate for online tutoring.
With all the technology that’s available to us like screen sharing on both sides, shared mouse control (this makes it possible for us to do interactive and engaging activities like educational games), shared interactive white boards, and online multi-sensory tools (great for Orton-Gillingham based instruction), we’ve wowed our parents with what is possible online. If I haven’t convinced you yet, maybe our team members and parents will:
“I had my virtual tutoring sessions today, and it went great. My students were so happy to see me, and we got a lot done. I had some doubts, but it’s going so well!”
— Cindy, CHT Team member
“We are gaining some nice momentum with the online sessions!”
— Irma, CHT parent
“My tutoring clients and I moved to a virtual platform and it was SO COOL!”
— Ellen, CHT Team Member
“My son is doing virtual sessions with Mia and he’s very happy with it.”
— Barbara, CHT Parent
“I confess I was skeptical about whether it would be as effective as the face-to-face sessions but I'm completely sold. I have no doubt there are tons of families who, for a variety of reasons, aren't able to take advantage of your in-person services but could benefit from virtual tutoring.”
— Penny, CHT Parent
If you’re ready to give this a try, please contact us to talk further! Remember, there are never any long-term commitments or set-up fees, so you can stop at any time if you decide it’s not a fit.
For more reading, check out tips to keep kids reading during long breaks and this article on Mindfulness (I think we could all use some of that during this crazy time)!
