The advances in technology and the web have made finding what you need in the world so much easier. The web has also made finding help and services a simple click away. For students this is a godsend, help with any aspect of their education is available online 24/7.
The rise of online educational websites has spawned new opportunities for providers to offer custom made math homework help services. This is really a powerful and exciting advance on how students learn Math. Compare it to even 15 years ago, if you could not understand the lesson in class and could not figure out the topic in the textbook you effectively fell behind and had to struggle to catch-up now with the web and the services available any student can search a myriad of informative website until they get the exact information they need.
Traditionally students were passively accepting the information provided by teachers and textbooks as their main source of learning math. With self service online math tutor services the students now have the control to dictate the pace of their learning and the ability to actively choose the topics and subjects they wish to learn. This makes math much more engaging and challenging for students. It also follows the principle of No Child Left Behind as all students can now control the lesson and tailor it to their needs.
The other great boon of Online Math Tutor services is their accessibility and affordability. Personal math tutors used to be the preserve of the wealthy but with online math tutors now costing as little as $25 per year cost is no longer a barrier. As to accessibility this is what the web is all about, opening up information and education to the masses. It’s like having your own personal math tutor on stand-by 24/7.
These advantages should not really come as a surprise to anybody as the banks, travel agents, ticket agents and every shop in the world has figured out people like to self serve, they like to browse and read and check out whatever they want when they want it and this is also true in math tutors.
So next time you need math homework help and the your first thought is to get a math tutor at $30 per hour, first just check out what kind of services are available online and you’ll see the true power of the Online Math Tutor.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Inviting everyone to give SecondTeacher a go for FREE!
Hi Everyone.
We want to get everyone to try SecondTeacher.com.
So until the new year SecondTeacher is FREE! All you need to do is register with the promotional code TRY4FREE. This will give you full access until the new year for free.
Why not try it out today!
We want to get everyone to try SecondTeacher.com.
So until the new year SecondTeacher is FREE! All you need to do is register with the promotional code TRY4FREE. This will give you full access until the new year for free.
Why not try it out today!
Monday, November 2, 2009
Slow Progress and Motivation
We are slowing picking up customers and our user base continues to grow. Of course I wish we had more which would give us more resourses and enable us to expand our offering but in the real world where the banks are still closed for business all growth has to be self financed. This means we need the users before we can expand.
In an effort to convert more of our traffic to actual users we're hearing that Silverlight is a constraint for some people. Now I think Silverlight is a wonder of science and enables you to do so much more on the web. In my opinion in 2-3 years this will be the de-facto standard. But unfortunately we might be just a little ahead of the game "on the bleeding edge" as it's called.
We have decided to hedge our bets a bit. We are currently developing a slimmed down AJAX version of our content pages to allow people in restrictive environments view our content. Now the full experience will always be Silverlight and I'm willing to bet that in a couple of years this is an obsolete move but now we need to live with the technologies that people use, not what we think they should use.
So for all those users who would like to see what we can do but can't (or won't) use Silverlight we have a solution coming down the track...
In an effort to convert more of our traffic to actual users we're hearing that Silverlight is a constraint for some people. Now I think Silverlight is a wonder of science and enables you to do so much more on the web. In my opinion in 2-3 years this will be the de-facto standard. But unfortunately we might be just a little ahead of the game "on the bleeding edge" as it's called.
We have decided to hedge our bets a bit. We are currently developing a slimmed down AJAX version of our content pages to allow people in restrictive environments view our content. Now the full experience will always be Silverlight and I'm willing to bet that in a couple of years this is an obsolete move but now we need to live with the technologies that people use, not what we think they should use.
So for all those users who would like to see what we can do but can't (or won't) use Silverlight we have a solution coming down the track...
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Should I use Silverlight
Now I’m a Windows developer but always worked behind the scenes. I never had to design any externally facing interfaces until SecondTeacher and this poses plenty of cost and problems. I discovered Silverlight about a year ago and was hooked it is built for someone like me who doesn’t want to learn all the intricacies of design on the web and just wants to build application.
The biggest problem I have with Silverlight is the user adoption rate. I worry that it will put people off using the site because of the need to load another plug-in with only between 25% - 40% depending on who you listen to already using it. That is a large chunk of people who are without. For me in the end I went with the logic that Silverlight is the future and for me to replicate the functionality I can achieve in Silverlight is going to take me an age and cost me a fortune. I know it might put a few off short-term but long-term it opens up the possibilities of what we can deliver and also makes delivering a quality experience much easier.
Just my thoughts
Rob
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Teachers Rule the World!
I have had a great experience this week in visiting classrooms and learning how teachers teach the curriculum.
First off I think our system is not right we have students pressurized into learning lists of information and then regurgitating in an exam. The kids who can remember the best are the brightest!!??!!
When did this happen we are not preparing our kids to enter the world with a broad range of knowledge to act as a foundation to support them in the choices and decisions they will need to make.
We also have some fantastically dedicated and brilliant teachers and then we have well some who aren't. The teacher is a vital element in society and we’ve all heard “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”, but teachers are actively instilling in our kids the educational experiences that will see them through life, they are nearly as powerful.
Teaching is a hard job but it should be a vocation not a job and the best teachers love doing it, which is true in most areas of life.
First off I think our system is not right we have students pressurized into learning lists of information and then regurgitating in an exam. The kids who can remember the best are the brightest!!??!!
When did this happen we are not preparing our kids to enter the world with a broad range of knowledge to act as a foundation to support them in the choices and decisions they will need to make.
We also have some fantastically dedicated and brilliant teachers and then we have well some who aren't. The teacher is a vital element in society and we’ve all heard “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”, but teachers are actively instilling in our kids the educational experiences that will see them through life, they are nearly as powerful.
Teaching is a hard job but it should be a vocation not a job and the best teachers love doing it, which is true in most areas of life.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
CrowdSourcing and Outsourcing - Beat the Recession
Much of SecondTeacher.com is graphics and videos and design in general. Now design paid for local is great, you get quick easy access to professionals and anything goes wrong he's just down the road...but it's also very expensive.
We at SecondTeacher.com have made use of a few different outsourcing techniques to get the best quality design at the best prices.
First we used CrowdSpring.com to get our logo done. CrowdSpring is a system where by you post a job of work (in this case design a logo) with a spec of the requirements and then specifiy a price. Then over the next 7-14 days you get submissions which are near complete logos. You comment on each one as they come in, the idea being that each new idea might spark a bit of competition in the "crowd" and you end up with in effect 100's of designers working on your logo.
CrowdSpring is great and the "crowd" designer works really well. But it is limited in what you can get done in CrowdSpring and the lowest price of around $300 is much higher then some other sites for a big design job it's a winner.
We have used Elance.com for much of our other design jobs mainly because they are small in value. Elance is more a traditional outsourcing site. You submit a job and a price range and then professionals from all over the world bid to do the job. You can see portfolios and references for each bidder and you really get the best price because of the auction like process. Sometimes though a winning bidder doesn't work out and you may have to re-submit to get a better professional but generally they are very good.
We have used Elance to get brochures, flyers, postcards, banners, videos even website coding done and most of the time it has been a success. The key to using Elance is to break the jobs up into small chunks as for the money you're paying you really can't expect someone to take a task and run with it you need to spell out exactly what it is you want done.
We've also used sites to get stock photography, stock video and stock audio to get the job done. There are now outsourcing and crowdsouring services for everytrhing and anything e.g. www.NameThis.com - Get the "Crowd" to come up with a name for something. Amazon's Mechanical Turk - An on-demand human workforce, where you can define a task and get real people to perform it.
My advice to anyone is that with a little effort and thought there is a web provider out there who will do any task you want done at a fraction of the price of a local provider and better quality too.
We at SecondTeacher.com have made use of a few different outsourcing techniques to get the best quality design at the best prices.
First we used CrowdSpring.com to get our logo done. CrowdSpring is a system where by you post a job of work (in this case design a logo) with a spec of the requirements and then specifiy a price. Then over the next 7-14 days you get submissions which are near complete logos. You comment on each one as they come in, the idea being that each new idea might spark a bit of competition in the "crowd" and you end up with in effect 100's of designers working on your logo.
CrowdSpring is great and the "crowd" designer works really well. But it is limited in what you can get done in CrowdSpring and the lowest price of around $300 is much higher then some other sites for a big design job it's a winner.
We have used Elance.com for much of our other design jobs mainly because they are small in value. Elance is more a traditional outsourcing site. You submit a job and a price range and then professionals from all over the world bid to do the job. You can see portfolios and references for each bidder and you really get the best price because of the auction like process. Sometimes though a winning bidder doesn't work out and you may have to re-submit to get a better professional but generally they are very good.
We have used Elance to get brochures, flyers, postcards, banners, videos even website coding done and most of the time it has been a success. The key to using Elance is to break the jobs up into small chunks as for the money you're paying you really can't expect someone to take a task and run with it you need to spell out exactly what it is you want done.
We've also used sites to get stock photography, stock video and stock audio to get the job done. There are now outsourcing and crowdsouring services for everytrhing and anything e.g. www.NameThis.com - Get the "Crowd" to come up with a name for something. Amazon's Mechanical Turk - An on-demand human workforce, where you can define a task and get real people to perform it.
My advice to anyone is that with a little effort and thought there is a web provider out there who will do any task you want done at a fraction of the price of a local provider and better quality too.
Monday, September 21, 2009
SEO Is a Bit of a Game
I'm new to the game that is SEO and my opinion is that it kind of makes a mockery of the standard search results. There is an industry built up trying to convince primarily google that the sites they manage are the de-facto source of the information the planet is looking for.
This is obviously nonsense.
There are millions of websites out there with no effort made to make them more "crawler" friendly and they contain great content. Many small time operators just do not know that this is how it works. They believe if they create a good website the googlebot will pick them up and rank them accordingly. Any search engine that can actually do this is an absolute winner but there are none and I doubt there ever will be because whatever algorithms the search engines use the SEO industry will warp to get their sites on top.
Now eventually a small operator may begin to break into the results after time and alot of very good content and a loyal audience but then a new young savy startup will come along spend the SEO dollars and jump to the top again with a fraction of the content and a negligable audience but because of manipulation of tags and links will be made to look like the new source of all knowledge to the googlebot.
In my opinion the search engines using link counts as an important factor is flawed. Links in blogs and forums and various directories can all be manipulated to make a site look pervasive.There should be a definate manually defined ranking system for links to grade them which I'm sure they try to do but if the SEO experts can still through slight of hand get a site well ranked then it's just not working well enough.
Who am I to preach I'm jumping on the same bandwagon, sure this blog was originally concieved as a source of potential links too.....but sure hey what can you do.
This is obviously nonsense.
There are millions of websites out there with no effort made to make them more "crawler" friendly and they contain great content. Many small time operators just do not know that this is how it works. They believe if they create a good website the googlebot will pick them up and rank them accordingly. Any search engine that can actually do this is an absolute winner but there are none and I doubt there ever will be because whatever algorithms the search engines use the SEO industry will warp to get their sites on top.
Now eventually a small operator may begin to break into the results after time and alot of very good content and a loyal audience but then a new young savy startup will come along spend the SEO dollars and jump to the top again with a fraction of the content and a negligable audience but because of manipulation of tags and links will be made to look like the new source of all knowledge to the googlebot.
In my opinion the search engines using link counts as an important factor is flawed. Links in blogs and forums and various directories can all be manipulated to make a site look pervasive.There should be a definate manually defined ranking system for links to grade them which I'm sure they try to do but if the SEO experts can still through slight of hand get a site well ranked then it's just not working well enough.
Who am I to preach I'm jumping on the same bandwagon, sure this blog was originally concieved as a source of potential links too.....but sure hey what can you do.
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