Probably not a single person, even remotely connected with education, will argue with the fact that these days a good tutor is worth their weight in gold. Individual lessons with a teaching specialist have always been and remain one of the most effective ways to acquire new knowledge and skills or improve what has been taught previously at an educational institution. One-on-one work with a teacher will never be able to be replaced by either courses or self-education.
Today it is already difficult to imagine what difficulties students had to overcome when they wanted to work with a famous teacher in the pre-digital era. Among them, trips to a teacher who is across the city are by no means the most difficult obstacle that one might face. Imagine that the teacher you would like to work with lives on the other side of a big city. And to get to their lesson, you need to spend an hour or two on the way there and the same amount going home. And if you are separated by even greater distances, if perhaps you live in different cities? How do you like phone lessons? These come with very expensive bills. What about an exchange of tasks and answers by mail? Not by email, but by old fashioned snail mail. With envelopes, stamps and the like. And this is only possible if the teacher will agree to the telephone or mail instruction format. But it could very well be that you are told something like: “Yes, I can find time for you next week. Fly in.”
Okay, enough of the ramshackle horrors of the analog past. You probably already understand what we are getting at. Modern technologies have ushered in a revolution, not only in education in general, but also in tutoring, which seemed to be an island of conservatism. And that’s great. Today, the student and the tutor are no longer separated by distance. A good individual educator can (and is) looking for clients all over the world, calmly meeting with them face to face, individually adapting assignments, sorting out errors and questions that have arisen.
Moreover, modern technologies have greatly facilitated the work of teachers (not only tutors) in such matters as the need for multiple repetitions of the same material. It is one thing to generate new pedagogical ideas and develop new teaching methods, and quite another to say the same thing over and over again. Today, any tutor can easily write down the ‘standard’ for each lecture, providing it with good illustrative material and focus on additions and comments, taking into account the progress of and questions from each student.
In this teaching format, it is very important to choose the optimal tool. Of course, it is different for everyone – some tutors like one way of communicating with students, some prefer others. But we would like to draw all tutors’ attention to the relatively recent debut of the Pitch Avatar presentation service. Why? Because while working on it, its creators asked themselves this question: “Why is a good lecture not a presentation?” and tried to take into account the needs of tutors.
Why is it interesting for teachers specializing in individual work with students?
In Pitch Avatar, you can upload a video lecture that has been uploaded to YouTube, as well as a presentation created using the most specialized tools – PowerPoint, Keynote and others, embedding the resulting presentation on your website.
But the main thing is an advanced, flexible feedback system, thanks to which the tutor immediately receives a message when one of their students begins to view the presentation lecture. Accordingly, with the help of a special button, they can, if free, report that they are ready to answer questions and give commentary on the lecture. In the same way, a student, if they have questions about the lecture, can ask them and indicate that they would like to receive answers to them.
We’re sure you’ll agree, it’s convenient. You can allocate a time window to the student, and open access to a lecture, which they can watch and you communicate with them without having to use a third-party resource, on the same page where the lecture is posted. At the same time, there is no need to waste time on continuous student support throughout the lecture, connecting only when they have questions.
In addition, you can set up the report function, thanks to which the teacher can monitor the student’s progress for each lecture.
As you can see, using our service, a tutor can completely get rid of tedious, constant repetition of the same material, focusing on solving the problems of each individual student and freeing up maximum time for pedagogical creativity.
