Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I'm feeling particularly, well, relieved.
The reason -- a lot of pressure that I feel is apparent in supporting my children in school
has been lifted from my shoulders.
How can that be, you ask?
Stick around and I'll show you.
I have found a service called HelpHub which is basically online tutoring for students.
Now any parent today knows that one of the real banes of our existence is trying to help
our kids as they get older in school and support them in their scholastic endeavors.
Now I don't know about you but when I was in high school, I sucked at math.
I did in all areas.
Now I was lucky.
My dad was an engineer.
He could help me.
He liked math.
I never liked math and now if my kids need help in math, I still don't like math.
So what's a parent to do?
Well, there are a variety of different online services that you can find.
Certainly, just searching on the web itself and finding tools like the Khan Academy are
awesome.
But nothing beats tutoring and peer tutoring as far as helping kids over the hump and to
understand things.
This service called HelpHub is designed just for that.
It's designed to allow students to have access to tutors, both peer tutors and professional
tutors, anytime 24/7.
So when they're doing their homework, when they're doing the assignment, when they're
preparing for those university entrance exams, they can find somebody to help.
There are two different levels of support available at HelpHub.
There is just a chat-based support which is completely free where different tutors come
in.
What they've done is actually something pretty cool with HelpHub.
They've gamified the system and they do that to add competition and also to be kind of
a self-filtering measure that makes sure that the best tutors rise to the top.
What happens is the tutors appear in a chat room and if a student has a question they
can ask a question in chat and somebody can jump in.
Up to several tutors can answer their questions in chat.
That's all free.
If the student finds a tutor that they like, that has the information that they want and
they feel they can communicate with, they can then engage them in a variety of different
ways as far as being able to be tutored more, through video conferencing or through a dedicated
chat.
They've even got SMS capabilities to help students out.
So there are lots of different ways for students to gain access.
It's free to start with.
When you sign in, you can just sign in with your Facebook account.
You got to HelpHub.me.
I'm just in the process of signing in so you can see what happens.
I started to create a profile but you can see the different players in the game, shall
we say, students, parents, if you're interested in becoming a tutor or if you're an instructor.
I'm going to say I'm a parent and I just go to create my account.
That brings me into the interface, allows me to start searching and allows me to start
interacting with the service.
So if I put down I need help with Algebra 11, I can go and I can find tutors right away.
Boom, just like that.
As I say, 24/7 there are tutors available.
Here, this is Nolan.
He was this math student at UVic who'll be attending the University of Calgary next year
to continue his studies.
He's also familiar with Astronomy and Physics and based on the number of IQ points, you
give points to people to help you.
They also have a tipping system which allows you, if a tutor helps you, you can give them
a little tip of $1, $5, that sort of stuff.
But the bottom line is when students need help is when they're working on whatever it
is they're working and there isn't always help available to them.
They might be working late at night, at 10:00 at night or they might have a day off and
they might be working at 10:00 in the morning.
Finding tutors when they're actually engaged in doing their homework, studying or preparing
is a real challenge.
This way here, the tutors are available when and where the students are available.
It's very reasonably priced and as far as I'm concerned, it's a bit of a peek at the
future.
From my perspective, it take a lot of pressure off the parents because in areas where I can
help my kids and subjects that I can help my kids, I'm happy to but in areas where I
can't, I often really feel guilty, the fact that I don't know and I don't understand.
This is a way around all of that -- HelpHub.me.
You should check it out.
Now I hope you found this little Tubetorial today to be useful.
If you have, there are three ways that you can get in touch with our community here at
Dottotech or stay in touch.
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ever so much.
I'm Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!