| General News | |
| SMARTHINKING Adds Live, Online math Tutoring
In Spanish (11/8/04) Starting in January, students who use the online tutoring service from SMARTHINKING can choose live, online math tutoring with Spanish-speaking tutors. This new offering joins SMARTHINKING’s existing live tutoring options in math, writing, chemistry, biology, physics, statistics, accounting, economics and Spanish. Further, live math tutors are available 24/7, and students can submit school essays to the online writing lab for personalized critique, usually within 24 hours. SMARTHINKING’s bi-lingual math tutorials serve as a “safety-net” for those students whose first language is Spanish. The one-to-one instruction is primarily conducted in English, but tutors have the ability to communicate in Spanish, thus ensuring students’ comprehension. “By combining bilingual math tutoring with the online writing lab’s English language learning specialists, SMARTHINKING provides a powerful support service for students for whom English is a second language,” says Burck Smith, CEO of SMARTHINKING.Read more... |
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| eStudent Services, an Audit Tool (10/11/04) Minnesota State Colleges and Universities for Minnesota Online’s eStudent Services. In partnership with WCET, they created a student service “audit tool” that assists institutions in identifying web-based student services that could be improved. It also provides strategies for improving those services. |
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| Schools Turn To Electronic Tutors (10/11/04) Intelligent tutoring software is finding its way into a number of classrooms around the United States. Intelligent tutors are applications that attempt to "learn" how individual students approach certain types of problems in an effort to understand their strengths and weaknesses. The tutors then provide feedback and hints based on that assessment. One of the leaders in the market for such tools is Cognitive Tutor, the product of a company called Carnegie Learning, which began at Carnegie Mellon University. Art Graesser, a professor of psychology and computer science at the University of Memphis who had done research on such systems, describes the Carnegie system as "the standard" of intelligent tutors, and studies conducted by Carnegie Mellon University have shown consistently higher performance by students who use the application than by those who do not. Some observers note that while intelligent tutors work for subjects such as math that have clear answers, they are not as useful for subjects with less well-defined answers, such as sociology or psychology. Still, teachers, students, and administrators at the 1,700 middle and high schools where Cognitive Tutor is used generally have glowing praise for the system.Read more... |
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| Tutoring | |
| SMARTHINKING Adds Live, Online math Tutoring
In Spanish (11/8/04) Starting in January, students who use the online tutoring service from SMARTHINKING can choose live, online math tutoring with Spanish-speaking tutors. This new offering joins SMARTHINKING’s existing live tutoring options in math, writing, chemistry, biology, physics, statistics, accounting, economics and Spanish. Further, live math tutors are available 24/7, and students can submit school essays to the online writing lab for personalized critique, usually within 24 hours. SMARTHINKING’s bi-lingual math tutorials serve as a “safety-net” for those students whose first language is Spanish. The one-to-one instruction is primarily conducted in English, but tutors have the ability to communicate in Spanish, thus ensuring students’ comprehension. “By combining bilingual math tutoring with the online writing lab’s English language learning specialists, SMARTHINKING provides a powerful support service for students for whom English is a second language,” says Burck Smith, CEO of SMARTHINKING.Read more... |
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| Schools Turn To Electronic Tutors (10/11/04) Intelligent tutoring software is finding its way into a number of classrooms around the United States. Intelligent tutors are applications that attempt to "learn" how individual students approach certain types of problems in an effort to understand their strengths and weaknesses. The tutors then provide feedback and hints based on that assessment. One of the leaders in the market for such tools is Cognitive Tutor, the product of a company called Carnegie Learning, which began at Carnegie Mellon University. Art Graesser, a professor of psychology and computer science at the University of Memphis who had done research on such systems, describes the Carnegie system as "the standard" of intelligent tutors, and studies conducted by Carnegie Mellon University have shown consistently higher performance by students who use the application than by those who do not. Some observers note that while intelligent tutors work for subjects such as math that have clear answers, they are not as useful for subjects with less well-defined answers, such as sociology or psychology. Still, teachers, students, and administrators at the 1,700 middle and high schools where Cognitive Tutor is used generally have glowing praise for the system.Read more... |
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