Hi, I'm Kevin the creator of the Mathsaurus website and today I'm going to talk
to you about how to get started with teaching maths online. So I know there
are a lot of people out there trying out teaching online for the first time
because of schools being closed down because of the spread of the coronavirus
and what I want to do today is to show you some of my tips for online lessons
that I've learnt over the course of a few years of making videos and teaching
students privately online. There are certainly some downsides to teaching
online but there are also loads of incredible opportunities and benefits
and ways that you can sometimes deliver even better lessons
online than in person. So as well as making videos for the Mathsaurus Channel
I've got hundreds of hours of private tuition online, seven years of teaching
experience at two of London's finest academic private schools and three
master's degrees in mathematics including an undergrad and masters from
Oxford and so I hope that you will benefit from my experience here and from
this you'll be able to be up setting up online math lessons in no time.
If you're interested in finding students or you're a student looking for an online
math teacher I'd really recommend heading over to the Tutorfair website.
Please do use my affiliate link below and they have loads of tutors there
set up for online learning and in my experience lots of students also looking
for lessons. The best setup I think for an online lesson is going to vary a lot
depending on the particular teacher and the age of the students and exactly what
they're learning but I think with some structure and with some thought you can
really make it work well with with most students although I would say that it's
easiest and it works best when you have students who are quite focused and
committed and probably easier with all the students than younger ones but no
reason it can't work with all of them and one theme here is that some of the
difficulties for example having less focused students although we might notice
them suddenly when they go online they're often exactly the same issues we
may have had in person so so do give online teaching a go
and do try to see through some of the problems to the benefits. I'm really
going to talk about three main things in this video. Firstly I'm going to show you my
physical setup in terms of the equipment I've got here and what I use and what
you need to get started. You don't need all of it by any means you can get by
with quite a limited setup and still give good lessons. I'm going to show you a
load of online software that I use in particular all the free stuff in fact
more or less all the software that I use is free and open source and thirdly
talked a little bit about setting up structures for lessons and how to make
online work as a way of working and getting into good routines. So I hope
it's useful. Please do put in the comments below any questions and any
thoughts and if there's enough I'll make another video responding to them perhaps.
Otherwise let me start by showing you some of the equipment
So the physical setup if your lessons is something you're going to want to think
about before you start teaching. If you've got that set up then you can have
a really smooth start to the lessons and communicate just as clearly as you would
do in person with students. As you can see here I've got two monitors set up in
my office and also a tablet to write on and there's loads of these tablets
available at a wide range of budgets as well. I should say I've put a link below
to my Amazon store and there you can see more details on all of the products that
I'm using and get them for yourself if you want to. Actually this tablet is
super easy to set up you really just plug it into the USB and then it works
exactly like a mouse and it lets you draw on the screen just as if you had a
touchpad. Obviously for doing something like making constructions where you need
rulers and compasses it's a bit more difficult or perhaps even if you just
prefer a writing pen on paper instead there is another option that I've used
sometimes which is simply to mount a webcam over the desk and to to share
that screen with students and actually that's how I did all of my lessons
before I bought the tablet and that worked pretty well as well.
The main downside of that method would be that you need to scan in or take
photos of the work that you've done as well if you want to share them with
students whereas with the tablet you have it straight away on the screen you
can save it really easily. You probably also want some sort of webcam to point at
your face I think so that you can talk to the students and most people have
that built into a to a laptop anyway but you can easily of course use the same
webcam for that as you use for the desk if you've got a way of switching it
quickly. The webcam I have on the desk is usually attached to one of these
bendy mounts. In fact I've got one here like this and you can move this around
very easily you can point to itself and you can clamp it to the desk and then
point it down at the table really easily as well. Another option if you'd
prefer just to write pen on paper you can get these specially built
cameras like this where you just place it on the desk and
then there's a camera here and it will just sit over the work and you can use
that as an input to share with the student as well.
So once you're set up yourself and ready to deliver online lessons another
thing you'll want to think about is what kit your students need and do they need
to have all of this stuff as well and I think the good news is in my opinion
they don't really need to. I think as long as you've got reasonably focused
students and they've got some sort of webcam set up the lessons can
work perfectly well. Now in an ideal world perhaps they might also have a
tablet or some way of writing on the screen and there's certainly lots of
options that allow you to share screens and do things like that but it can often
get a little bit complicated to do that in terms of troubleshooting you know
tech issues and things so I often find that it's better for me simply to have
the screen and to be talking through problems with students. Some people
are not convinced when I first say that this works well but you know if you
really think about in a traditional lesson and how often you know a student is
spending time at the whiteboard and how often you're there explaining things and
you know one on one you actually get a lot more verbal feedback you can talk to
the student and you know they're asking questions
often the whole time and so in practice you can get by pretty
well especially with the older students I think. But one thing
that is really useful is that if they at least have some sort of camera or
scanner where they have scanned in some work so an option to still be able to
see their work for example is for them to scan it in ahead of the lesson and
then you can bring that work up on the screen and talk through what they've
done in advance and actually I often find you know it's better to to look
through work that students have really done and thought about and considered
rather than just that sort of high-pressure moment where you're asking
them a question and they can actually you know that almost encourages them to
come with slightly more considered questions and things as well. So there
are lots of options here but as I say I think a relatively
low-tech setup on behalf of the students is probably what we should
expect. It's not really reasonable to expect students to be as set up with
loads of tech and I think it's better if we design our lessons and our set up in
a way that can take advantage of it when they do have the tech but is still
working very well when they don't.
So now I'm going to show you some of the software and some of the online tools
that I use, most of which are free, to help with online lessons and I think
this really is the best part of teaching online. Because unlike in-person you have
access to all of your files, to the whole internet, to so many useful tools that
you can use to demonstrate the ideas in maths and to respond to things as
they come up with students as well so it really does give you a lot of
flexibility and this is where in some ways you know it can be better than
teaching in person. So okay starting with the basics obviously you do need some
way of connecting to the student. I would tend to use Skype but there's loads of
other options available like that. I'm not going to go through those and you
probably have your favorite already and the thing you know that I use in Skype
is really the ability to share the screen with a student okay so there's a
button that you can click and then the student as well as being able to see my
face through my webcam can see the output of my second monitor and
everything that I write there in a window on on their screen as well.
But the most important thing is you know what do we put on to that second monitor
and the first piece of software that I really want to talk about is called Open Board
Open Board is a totally free piece of software and as you can see as I'm
demonstrating it here you can have the software open on one screen and then it
puts the actual whiteboard over onto a second monitor so it also makes it great
for use in physical classrooms as well where you can have your PC and the
physical whiteboard in the room separately so that you can have access
to all the tools and and other things on the screen and the student just gets to
see the clean finished whiteboard. It's got loads of really
handy tools in as well and it does it all really nice and simply so for
example you can just you know do a snip of any area of the screen and copy it
straight into into Open Board. Once you've finished the lesson you can just
very quickly turn all of the slides that you've been using into a PDF.
Again, another situation where we have an advantage over real classrooms here you know
you can write several whiteboards worth of
material and you can go back and forth between the notes you've you've written
in that lesson without having to to rub them off you can easily pull in
questions from exam papers and diagrams without having to spend loads of time
sitting with the students waiting for you to draw them so one
thing I'll make use of a lot in lessons is the website Desmos. A really good
intuitive graphing tool and all online so you don't need to download anything
to use this. You can get it very easily to plot graphs x squared X cubed x to
the 4 whatever you want to. You can do much harder things as well obviously but
really easy to put something in there and then if you're using Open Board
as I suggested before again you know I can just you know take a graph from here,
say 'Add to current page' and I can put it straight into my notes and onto the
whiteboard that I'm sharing with the student. Lots of little fun things that
are built into here as well I think if you type in 'betchacant' it will come up
with, it'll say 'challenge accepted' and it'll come up with an interesting
animation. It looks like they've got some sort of PacMan style thing here and it's
all been made as you can see in there in mathematical notation so lots of fun
things for students to look at and explore in there.
OK, here's Geogebra, another totally free tool another one I use quite a lot.
I mean they have graphing things as well. Initially I knew this as a tool for
doing geometry but it's extended into a lot more now. I actually
use it a lot for its little app on probability distributions here which is
great for A-level maths in particular. You know you can just put in
all sorts of distributions. You've got the normal distribution here but there's a
whole list of of different distributions you can come up with and you can use it
to calculate probabilities and demonstrate the ideas
there and again really easily copy it into your whiteboard with Open Board.
So here's a Wolfram Alpha I guess loads of people know about this website
already but it's a super powerful computational engine you know I can tell
it to you know work out all of these derivatives whatever and if you type a
function in and wait for it to do some computation it will you know really
come up with a lot of information on those things again
interesting to get answers in itself but then also usually gives you
some other output to explore and to think about that can motivate further
questions. You can can ask it to tell you a joke and so it will tell you a joke with
some sort of mathematical background in here. Some of these use
slightly more advanced maths than some of our students will be ready for
but you know still quite a nice little feature.
And another nice thing is of
course if you've got any bespoke materials that you've made for classes
in the past. I didn't make this one but here's a you know explanation of
a regression line that has come from some slightly older resources here but it's
great to be able to type in data and to play around with those ideas and
when you're online you have access to all of this stuff all right at your
fingertips if you're just a little bit organized with your files and folders and
the last thing I'd really advise you to get hold of is something like this.
One of the calculator emulators. Now this is not free to individuals. I think it costs
about ten pounds to have the license from Casio and but you may have access
to it for free if you also working for a school or something
but what this allows you to do is to you know to show the calculator exactly as
the student will be using it. I know a lot of people use these in physical
classrooms these days on the screen as well but I can really type all of
the buttons on the calculator exactly as you touch the real one and you know I
can go here and show them how to use the calculator to solve a
quadratic equation and if they've got their calculator in person they can sort of
follow along with it as the explanation goes on. If you see my videos
on the Mathsaurus channel you'll see me using this
quite a bit in those videos as well.
So once you've got your physical setup sorted and your online software all
ready to go the last thing to think about is I think actually how you're
going to manage the day-to-day experience of the students in terms of
setting them work making sure they've got access to resources and all of that
sort of stuff and this is another area where the online lessons really can work
a lot better. So there's loads of other options apart from Google Drive but
I tend to use Google Drive for my students because it's free
a lot of people are used to it but there are other options available and you can
share a particular folder there with a student so they have access just to that
folder here so I've made one called 'teaching maths online' and within that
you can have subfolders that they can see so you could have a folder where
they upload their work and then you know you could tell them every week if you
have a lesson on a Wednesday they have to upload some work you've given to them
by Tuesday. You can easily do this with a whole class if you had a folder for each
of them that you could share with them individually without the others being
able to see their work as well and you know then you can go through that in the
next lesson and you can put your comments or you can mark it if you want
to and put it back in this folder so they can see your comments before the
lesson. You know however you want to work. I mean in practice I think actually
marking work with the students you know whilst they're watching and you can talk
about it is is really good. I think a common misconception we have in teaching
sometimes it's somehow that if it involves us more work it must be better
for the students but I think marking is a great example where actually somehow
if you do it with them it's a much more engaging process and a more useful
process for both parties. We still have to mark exams, we still have to mark
other work sometimes but you know online this can work really well because
we have this sort of it's like we have this shared project that we're working
on with all these shared folders and documents and somehow
the students can take a bit more ownership of it sometimes as well.
so that's one thing and I think a second thing as well that has come up for me in
scheduling lessons and you know obviously when we're in person you turn
up and you're there and they're there and that's all very easy
whereas somehow online it's a bit easy for students to
you know to say they've forgotten the lesson and not turn up and have all
the timings right so another really useful feature is to do something like
using a Google Calendar invite where you're both invited by email and you
both accept it and then you know it appears in your lessons and you know if
you have notifications on your phone as most students do now you know they'll
get a notification 15 minutes before the lesson reminding them automatically.
It gets rid of a lot of problems like that. Again you know this is
particularly useful I think if you have students who operate in different time
zones as I do sometimes. Google will do all that admin of
matching up you know is it 3 p.m. here when it's 6 p.m. somewhere else and all
sort of stuff.
okay so I hope this has been useful to those if you thinking about setting up
online math lessons whether that's because you're forced into it because of
the situation we have an amendment with the coronavirus or because it's
something you're looking to do for online one-on-one tuition or for
whatever other reason. You know there are some disadvantages to online tuition.
I think somehow you don't quite get always the sort of personal
interaction that you that you get in person but as we've seen you've got
somehow access to all of these online tools and websites and it can really
make scheduling easier as well you can be at home you don't have to travel
between students if you're a private tutor. So I do
think that online tuition can work just as well if not a lot better
for some students. It has certainly allowed me to teach students who are you know
very far away in different parts of the world who have more demanding
schedules or sometimes I'll have students who have a combination of
in person lessons and some extra support online and there's loads of ways that
can work really well and I'm sure if at the coming month lots of people are
going to be experimenting with this and finding out exactly how it might work
for them. So please do put in the comments if you've got any questions or
things to discuss maybe if it gets a lot of response I'll do another video on
this replying to some of these things. Also if you're new to my channel the
Mathsaurus website and the YouTube channel have got hundreds of videos at
GCSE and a-level that I made whilst teaching in schools in London.
There's loads of past papers. There's questions by topic for every topic from
old exam questions for IGCSE and links to video solutions in most cases. I do a
lot of stuff for the Oxford maths admissions test and I'm doing a lot of
Cambridge STEP questions at the moment so please do share those with your
students and feel free to use them in your online teaching if they're useful.
I've put all of the links to the products that I've talked about in this
video in an Amazon store below as well and linked as
before to Tutorfair if you want to do some online teaching there and find some
students there are not put links to all of the free websites in the description
below as well so I really hope that's useful. Good luck with your online
studies and I hope to hear from some of you in the comments.