Beanbag

I’ve been working here at Beanbag for 6 weeks now, and thought it about time I add to the blogs and tell you a little bit about me and my experiences with tutors.

Private tutors have been a massive influence on my life. From the age of ten I’ve had singing lessons pretty much once a week. These lessons helped me realise my dream to be a musical theatre performer, and helped me to achieve a standard in singing which has made it possible for me to do that. It’s so important for a singer to have a secure technique, as it will enable consistency and stamina within the voice, and encourages vocal health. In my experiences and through teaching singing myself, I feel it important for children to begin learning a technique at a young age, thus preventing bad habits in singing, which could otherwise, lead to vocal disorders such as nodules.

Singing lessons haven’t been my only experience of private tutors. When I was taking my GCSE’s, I was lucky (not that I thought so at the time) to have both Math and French tuition, both of which I got below a C grade in my mock exams. My Mum took it upon herself to get me some extra help; one years worth of Maths tutoring brought me up from an E to a B grade, and with the extra French lessons I managed to achieve a C grade. Without this extra tuition, I’m certain I wouldn’t have achieved the grades I needed to get into sixth form. The private tutoring gave me the extra time and space away from the classroom to ask the questions I couldn’t ask in class, and as much time as I needed to grasp the areas of the subjects I struggled with.

Its been a busy couple of weeks here at Beanbag Towers and I have been neglecting this blog a little bit during that period so I thought I would do a quick update about whats been happening.

We made a pretty fundamental change to the way Beanbag works recently - replacing the drop-down menu of subjects based on the school curriculum (that more than one Beanbag user felt was limiting) with a subject tag based system that is entirely generated by the users.  This offers far greater flexibility to our members in describing the services they offer (for instance we now have a Yoga teacher for children on the site!).

Also we have recently moved beyond 400 tutors registered with the site.  We now have tutors the length and breadth of the UK (as well as a few in the USA, mainland Europe and Australia!).

Alot of other work has been done to improve the registration process, upgrade the privacy options on the site and to improve Beanbags findability on search engines (by which of course I mean Google!).

This work will continue and many more improvements will become apparent in the coming weeks and months so if there are any changes or features you would like to see please get in touch with me; matt@beanbaglearning.com

Yesterday was a bit of a banner day for education announcements during Gordon Browns speech at the Labour Conference in Manchester.  Alongside the leaked announcement about broadband vouchers there was also another major announcement of particular interest to the Beanbag community.

One-on-one tuition will be become a right for primary school children who are struggling with maths and English from 2011 (with pilot schemes running a year earlier).  This is a £315million programme so its been a good couple of days for those for an interest in one-to-one education and technology!

The full story can be found on the BBC website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7632194.stm

In a move that might well get buried amongst other announcements and the general speculation about his job Gordon Brown will today announce a new £300 million project to give 1.4 million children access to the internet at home.

This will consist of schools distributing vouchers worth between £100 and £700 to appropriate families and the vouchers will also be available for relevant software and in some cases computer hardware.

As well as helping the pupils access the internet to help with their studies and gain general IT skills it is hoped that wider access to the internet for the parents will make it easier for schools to maintain contact with the parents on issues such as homework and behavior issues.

This is great news as we here at Beanbag HQ strongly believe that there is an important role for the internet in education (alongside more traditional face-to-face learning rather than replacing it) but the key to the success of that is increasingly access to the internet and particularly broadband access.  Creating websites that will engage and hold the attention of children requires careful use of the latest web technologies and these require a good broadband connection to make the most of them.

In this period of economic crisis it is heartening to see education and technology rising to the top of the Governments agenda.

The BBC website is reporting a new initiative at a Scottish school to offer online assistance to pupils based on the lessons of the day.

The school, Alva Academy, will offer video and audio downloads recorded by the teachers offering recaps of lessons and extra guidance for homework.  Material like this is easily produced these days and the difficulty is getting people to commit to preparing the content for these 'shows' rather than any technology issues so its encouraging to hear about teachers getting behind such a project.

As the schools Deputy Head points out in the story students are more likely to engage with these offerings as it comes in a format that they are already familiar with and can integrate with their other online activities.

Here at Beanbag HQ we have been spending alot of time lately thinking about how a combination of technology and the right kind of teachers can help students and this sort of news is always encouraging.

Read the full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/tayside_and_central/7625680.stm

In the last few weeks the team here at Beanbag House has been growing at quite a pace.  Ed, Stefan and Lisa have all joined in the last month or so and I thought it was time they had a bit of an intro!

Stef joins us from Real World swapping a Peter Gabriel funded company in the lush countryside for a start-up opposite one of the noisiest building sites in Bristol.  Amongst other things Stef will make sure the site continues to look great and is easy to use.  He is also working on phase two of the Beanbag project which is Top Secret at the moment.

Ed joins us from Paperfly and as well as being a dab hand with power tools (as demonstrated by our lovely new wall mounted cork boards) is helping develop Beanbag on the technical side and also adding some much needed project management process to the team.  Ed also holds the office record for wearing shorts on consecutive days despite the terrible summer!

Lisa is the new Beanbag Community Advisor.  Her role is to help out current members as much as possible and help with the recruitment of new tutors.  Lisa has recently graduated from the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (yep the Paul McCartney place!) with a 1st Class degree in Performing Arts (Music) and spent her summer performing shows in Liverpool and Edinburgh.  As to why she is working at a web start-up with a bunch of geeky developers you'd have to ask her!

...well on the Guardian website as a feature on the PDA blog but still we are pretty pleased here at Beanbag Towers!

The post features a very fetching picture of founders Kevin and Jon (both myself and Pete managed to avoid that!) and is slightly out of date as we now have nearer 300 tutors and have made quite alot of improvements both to the site and our future strategy.

Still like the man said all publicity is good publicity so thanks to Jemima Kiss and the PDA team.

You can read the article here: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/09/elevator_pitch_beanbag.html

Introduce yourself 

Hi, I'm Will and I teach music in the Chester/Wirral/North Wales area.

How long have you been tutoring?

I have been teaching the piano now for 3 years. After qualifying as a teacher I did supply work in various schools in music and other subjects but found that the keyboard teaching aspect of the work to be the most rewarding so started taking on piano students privately from September 2005. This side of my teaching timetable now takes up most of my week and has the flexibility to fit around my other jobs which include conducting a local choral society, teaching music at a primary school and singing as a lay clerk (professional singer) in Chester Cathedral Choir.

What made you decide to start tutoring?

Having qualified as a teacher, piano tutoring gives me the opportunity to combine my teaching experience with one of my favorite pastimes, playing the piano.

Most rewarding part of tutoring?

The best bit about tutoring is being able to appreciate a student's progress. Perhaps they have found something particularly difficult and I have been able to help in some way (however apparently insignificant at the time).

Most challenging aspect of tutoring?

The most challenging aspect of tutoring is getting students who have lost interest and stopped practicing to get into it and get practicing again!

If you could sit on a Beanbag with anyone (historic or current) who would it be?

J.S Bach or Herbie Hancock

Will has his own website at http://www.williamhay.co.uk/ for more information

If you have visited the Beanbag homepage today you will see that we have made some pretty radical changes to the design in an attempt to make it even quicker and easier for you to find a tutor or get signed up if its your first visit.  The homepage now also shows the three most recently added tutors [well the three tutors with complete profile - tutors if you want to be featured be sure to add a photo!], a map that shows the location of another of our almost 300 tutors every time the page is refreshed as well as the two most recent blog posts by yours truly [if any tutor wishes to be featured in our Tutor of the Week slot or to provide a guest blog post just get in touch].

Not all the changes are so obvious though.  Alot of improvements have been made to make signing up even quicker and easier, we have done a great deal of work to help improve our findability via Google and we have also introduced Google advertising in some areas of the website.

As always your opinion is important to us so if you have any comments at all drop me a line.

After my blog post about home education last week the Guardian has done a follow up piece (!) in todays Education Guardian.  Spurred by the publication of a new book that is broadly supportive of home education, How Children Learn at Home by Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison (both of the Institute of Education at the University of London) it is a balanced piece of journalism that certainly does not dismiss home education (especially for younger children) but also points out some of its issues for older children looking to enter higher education.

It contains both examples of home education that will terrify many teaching professionals (like the child who did nothing but "watch Star Wars and play on the trampoline" til he was 12!) but also some examples of children who have been very successful through home education and have successfully made the tranistion to either college or university later on.

It seem that home education (or home schooling as our colonial cousins call it) is on the rise in the UK, especially with primary school aged children.  A growing reason for this seems to be an effort to free the child from the ever earlier pressures of tests and assessment and allow them to learn at a pace that is more suited to them as an individual.

There is evidence that home schooling does have its share of success and James Conroy from Dean of the Faculty of Education at Glasgow University was quoted in the Guardian saying "research shows home-schooled children do better in all standard tests."  In the same article Dr Roland Meighan, a former professor of education at Nottingham University, says studies show the home-educated are on average two years ahead of their peers in schools in any test and in any subject.

So from a results only side there are always concerns about lack of socialisation with other pupils and becoming part of something larger.  However with the increase in bullying and worries about youth crime that seems to less of a concern these days.

Over the weekend Beanbag stormed past 200 signed up tutors and we'd just like to thank everyone for the support.  The site is growing much quicker than we expected and we have a lot more improvements planned in the coming weeks that should make the experience of using and joining Beanbag an even easier experience.

It is important for us to get your feedback as much as possible, the more the community contributes the better the site will become, so feel free to contact me or use our Get Satisfaction page to let us know what you think of Beanbag and where you'd like to see it going in the future.

Thanks again!

This is a guest post from Nicole who is spending part of her summer working here with us at Beanbag helping with tutor recruitment and various other things.

"My name is Nicole Stenner and I am 16 years of age. I have just sat my GCSE’s and now that I have finished I am currently in my first job; where I am working here at Beanbag. This is a new experience that allows me to see what the world of work is actually like.

There was a big build up to my GCSEs as I knew where I want to be in the future and how much I wanted to succeed; therefore throughout school I pushed my self as hard as possible to make sure I got the grades I wanted and never stopped at nothing less.  However putting this much pressure on myself; as I created high standards, it caused me to “change” as a person. As I became more stressed with all the pressure of getting the coursework accurate or doing extra and the revision it all built up. I started  snapping at people because I was annoyed with all the revision. And how boring it was.

People around me were telling me to calm down and not put so much pressure on myself as it’s only exams but to me they weren’t just exams they decide your future; such as if you go college, university.

When my exams finally came I spent a lot of time revising for them such as 1-2 months before to make sure I was prepared and if I didn’t;  I knew I would get paranoid and frantic as I knew I wouldn’t remember the information.  However getting my sister and mother involved with helping me with my revision to break it up it helped me to see what subjects were my strongest and weakest points then work on them.

When my exams finally finished I was relived and I knew that I had tried my hardest therefore there was no point in going over each answer; so I am now awaiting my results. My advise to upcoming GCSE students is that work hard and do the best as you can but don’t let it take over your life."

Here is something that might be of interest to any tutors reading (though many of them are probably more than aware anyway). The Association of Tutors holding its 50th (Golden) Anniversary Workshop on the 27th August at Reading Town Hall. It has sessions that look interesting to anyone trying to build up a successful tutoring practice and is bound to be a great networking opportunity.

Beanbag is very much still a work in progress and we are always looking to make improvements and value users feedback.

Not exactly a feel good education story on the front of the Guardian today.

The idea that £35billion could be spent on mediocre buildings when education in general is underfunded and failing in lots of areas is mind boggling.

With the work that people like JISC and Futurelab have being doing about what needs to be done to create learning spaces fit for the 21st Century (and thats just activity I know about off the top of my head) you'd think they would be able to get it right.

It seems alot of money to spend on buildings when perhaps more should be spent on teachers, after school programs and ICT and it makes it even harder to take if the buildings aren't really fit for use now let alone future proofed.

I mentioned the What's Next? 21 Ideas for 21st Century Learning report from Charles Leadbeater and the Innovation Unit last week but after finally sitting down to read it fully I thought I would point out one particular section that I feel is of special interest to users of Beanbag (one way or the other.)

Chapter 5 of the report focuses on the concept of peer tutoring, that is having children become tutors to other children in the same school.  This is pretty standard in the good ol' USA as I understand it but this report covers the largest experiment in peer tutoring so far in the UK which took place in 125 primary schools in Fife.

The early results are positive apparently and a major benefit has been "on the self-esteem and motivation of the child who is the tutor."

Beanbag is obviously more about traditional tutoring models than peer tutoring though we do have an interest in the concept of near-peer tutoring (not sure if thats an official term but it has a certain ring to it!) with under and post graduates becoming involved in the tutoring process, bringing with them recent experience of the curriculum and study methods and an ability to hopefully relate better to the student.  This is something we would like to explore in the future in addition to offering the best possible service to the traditional tutor community.

It was a slightly surreal week for education coverage in the press this week as the arrival to these shores of the man, the legend Henry Winkler, better known as Arthur 'The Fonz' Fonzarelli, grabbed the spotlight.

While most of us I'm sure remember a man who spent a little too much time in the toilets and had a gift with juke boxes these days he has a second career as a popular childrens author and ambassador for both literacy and dyslexia charities.

It turns out Winkler suffers from dyslexia and his Hank Zipzer novels are based on his experiences growing up with no understanding of the condition and it being unrecognised by his teachers. Amongst other things he was in the UK to support the National Year of Reading (as well as plug his books I guess!).

In alot of ways its sad that it takes the involvement of a celebrity (even a slightly aging one!) to generate so much coverage of worthy causes but at the same time any extra exposure the challenges facing children with dyslexia and the importance of things like the National Year of Reading get can only be a good thing.

So thankyou Fonzie and say hi to Richie, Potsie and the gang next time you're in Al's.

A nice article about Beanbag and its founders Kevin and Jon was in this weeks Bath Chronicle which came out yesterday which means potentially a little over 20000 people know a little more about this website than they did on Wednesday.

One of the inspirations for this website was research undertaken at the Institute of Education by Judith Ireson and Katie Rushforth published in January 2005.

TED is an annual conference that gives 18 minute slots to the most interesting thinkers and challenges them to give the talk of their lives.  They have recently released videos of a number of the most popular talks over the 20 or so years of the conference.

The cover article in yesterdays Education Guardian Blue Skies Learning offers an interesting insight into a potential future for education in the UK and one that is likely to be of interest both to parents worried about their children getting enough attention in schools and educators looking beyond the school walls to achieve learning.

Hi, my name is Matt and I'll be doing my best to support the Beanbag community going forward. Any queries, comments or complaints (though hopefully not many of the latter!) feel free to drop me a line. I'll be working hard to make sure everyone gets what they want out of this service so the more feedback the better.

We at Beanbag would like to extend our congratulations to School of Everything for winning the New Statesman New Media Award in the Inform and Educate category.  We also wish them luck in the UK Catalyst Awards.

“We need to challenge the assumption that expertise and knowledge reside only within the walls of the educational system.” In making such a bold statement Futurelab, the not-for-profit educational researcher, addressed a fundamental issue in the way we view education.