Re: [Phys-L] On Line Tutoring

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 12/19/21 9:43 AM, Ron Curtin via Phys-l wrote:

> I am a recently retired, long time Physics teacher, and we’ve moved
> away from my school.  I have had a few students and parents from
> school ask about tutoring remotely.  I would enjoy doing it, but I’m
> not sure of the process.
>
> What I really need is some type of writable small smart workbook pad
> that I can attach to my MacBook laptop.   I would like to be able to
> write on it and, in real time, show the student what I am doing.  Has
> anyone out there had any experience with this type of thing?

Before we get to that, let me address a slightly different
question.

In any tutoring situation, the first words out of my mouth
are likely to be something like:
  Do you have any questions for me?
  How far did you get?
  Show me what you've got so far.

For this, it hardly matters how much fancy equipment I have;
it mostly depends on what the student has.

Seriously: The priceless advantage of tutoring is that it is
not lecturing. It's much more bidirectional. If you build a
setup that is optimal for lecturing, it might not be what you
want for tutoring.

Virtually all students have a phone. Maybe they also have a
laptop or desktop machine, or maybe not.

Also: You have to make a good impression on the first lesson,
or the won't be a second lesson. That means you can't impose
a lot of requirements on the first lesson.

So ... For the first lesson, in the typical case, the student
will have to write on paper, and show you the results via their
phone's built-in camera.

  For the Nth lesson for any given student, you can dream about
  having a setup with a phone-holder and a mirror, so that the
  student can look horizontally at the screen of the phone, while
  the camera looks vertically at the paper ... but that requires
  overcoming some tall potential barriers.
     https://www.av8n.com/physics/img48/gooseneck-phone-holder.jpg
     https://www.av8n.com/physics/img48/clip-on-mirror-for-phone.png

  Or the student could use a laptop with separate webcam. Decent
  USB webcams are pretty cheap nowadays. 

=================

For your own system, as others have indicated, you want to write
with a stylus. (Not a mouse, not one of those tiny trackpads that
you see on laptops.)

A) For a truly professional system, you want a touch screen, where
you can write on the same surface where the image appears.

B) As a viable compromise, you can get a high-quality tablet plus
a /separate/ high-quality screen. This takes a few minutes of
getting used to, but AFAICT it's the only solution that doesn't
sacrifice quality and doesn't cost a treeemendous amount of money.

I use a pressure-sensitive Wacom tablet that allows me to write
calligraphic thick and thin lines, depending on pressure.

--------

For back-end software, there are a bajillion "meeting" services, all
of which have screen-sharing features. If you know what school your
students are coming from, you might want to use whatever their school
has been using.

  The idea here, as always, is to think about things
  from the student's point of view.

For front-end software, use whatever drawing program you are comfortable
with. YMMV but I like to use /inkscape/ for almost everything. It can
draw geometric shapes (boxes, lines, etc.) plus typing plus freehand
sketches and calligraphy. It can import bitmap images. It likes to save
stuff in .svg format which is highly portable and can be edited later
and converted to any other format you can think of. (This stands in
contrast to saving a bitmap image in .pdf format or otherwise, which
is not editable in any useful way.)