Although I no longer offer the service to anyone outside of friends, I briefly offered e-tutoring sessions. It can be a rewarding situation in the right settings, but I was in a new place and din’t have the time to appropriately drum up a client base.
One of the benefits of e-tutoring is that it doesn’t matter where the tutor and the student are sitting. A student can be hundreds of miles away from the person who best fits their learning needs rather than hoping they can find a right match locally, or perhaps they have already exhausted the local tutoring pool and not found someone who can teach them.
What is happening, though, is that students are now sitting thousands of miles away from their tutor. This outsourcing brings up some fears, at least for me, since I make a goodly portion of my income from tutoring.
I can remember when a teacher’s greatest fear was being replaced by a computer (while computers may become major educational tools, they will never be able to completely replace the teacher). Now, we have to be afraid of those countries with a more advanced level of understanding in the math and sciences (the two main subjects I teach). Allowing this outsourcing of extra educational help is somewhat scary.
It almost feels like we have given up on improving our education system, or at least the math and science parts of it. How long before we have a crop of teachers come up who don’t worry about whether or not they have to teach math or science because we can turn to more advanced countries for those subjects. Are we doing the American educational system a disservice by outsourcing to these tutors?
Or perhaps, is this just one more sign that the world is getting smaller, and collaborative efforts will indeed prove incredibly beneficial to us? I think I like that idea more.
Found via elearningpost
Until I get the design worked out, I’m going to be posting links to other areas of the site in the sidebar under “RTD Divisions”.
Right now it only points to JewelryNiche because that’s the section people expect to see when they visit this site. So if you’re visiting to learn about me as a jewelry designer, you need to follow that link. At the moment, it’s only the blog entries from the old site, but I hope to have a gallery operational before November 1.
That said, it should be noted that this site is about to grow to encompass all of my Niche blogs and their associated belongings. The basic concept is to have an area to express myself in each of these areas, but to keep them accessible so I can more easily demonstrate links between them and, in a way, weave them all together.
It should paint quite the interesting picture, I’m hoping.
It also needs to be noted that now that the hiccup is fixed, I do rather love WordPress! It lets me blog in an experience that faintly resembles TypePad, where much of this site is coming from. Give me another couple of months, but I suspect I’ll have much kinder things to say about WordPress than I did about Drupal.
It turns out that Apricot Lane extended their fundraiser, so if you want to support a great cause (and have an opportunity to win a piece of my jewelry) and are anywhere near Redmond Town Center, head on over and check it out!
Every little bit helps!
I have a passing interest in e-learning, and I’m becoming more interested in how the social web is playing into it, especially for younger students. The term “digital native” is often used with these kids because many of today’s high schoolers (and younger) have never known a time where there wasn’t a computer easily accessible.
Here’s another interesting view on the role of technology in teaching these digital natives.
I maintain many to-do lists. Some might call this overdoing it, but it really helps me. I have one to-do list for every area of my life- reading, crafting, writing, personal website, professional web site. Each area’s to-do list is grouped by what the project’s current status is.
Then, I have a main to-do list, which is the one I work from. It has a section for each of these to-do lists. Depending on the list and its priority in my life, it has anywhere from one to five items from that area’s to-do list under it. I also keep more general to-do thing like housework on this main to-do list. (I suffer from out of sight, out of mind.)
I do sometimes worry about my system, but it really has helped me accomplish so much! It turns out I’m not the only person who has found a way to manage their to-do list to get things accomplished and keep it all in perspective. This makes me feel much better.
Over the weekend, I discovered a small technical glitch that has made things a bit tricky. We hope to resolve this very soon.
In the meantime, I’d like to thank those who supported Apricot Lane’s fundraising drive! I haven’t yet heard how much they raised, but I know the breast cancer foundation it’s going to will appreciate every bit of it.
You may have noticed something different. The site has now been migrated to WordPress! I’m really excited about this. We still have a lot of work to do around here, but this is going to be great!
Stay tuned for the new and improved Rebecca Thomas Designs!
I have been writing for as long as anyone can remember. Now, I’m teaching the basics of writing, and it’s so much more a fleeting thing. I can teach the concrete grammar skills, but teaching a child to put their ideas down on paper…it’s such an interesting challenge. To teach a child about strong word choice and writing concisely without giving up meaning. It’s really being a great learning experience.
As I am learning to teach children how to write the perfect five-papragraph papers, I am also learning a new writing form while trying to educate adults and teenagers that nonfiction is not a subgenre of fiction. It’s getting pretty intense, and I feel like my life is being overtaken by writing.
