As teachers, technology influences our careers not only in the classroom but outside it. In this guest post, Josh Pull looks at the growth of online tutoring and its place alongside traditional classroom study.
The popularity of international schools around the world continues to grow at a staggering pace. According to the International School Consultancy Group the number of international schools could almost double over the next decade. This has led to big questions as to how these schools can source enough high quality teachers to meet the global demand. The Education Investor recently ran a piece highlighting the challenge of finding teachers with experience of the English National Curriculum, which is used by 41% of international schools.
Your classroom at home
International schools are now looking towards technology to solve the problem. Keystone Tutors, a leading London based tutoring company, have been offering online tutoring directly to parents for over 5 years. More recently however they have started providing online tutoring directly to schools. “One-to-one online tutoring has been around for some time and has proved itself to be extremely effective as the technology continues to improve,” says Keystone Director Josh Pull. “However, more recently we’ve had requests from the schools themselves to provide online teachers to their students.”
Josh describes how they’ve worked with a number of schools, including one international school in Spain, where Keystone’s online tutors provided the entire Maths and English curriculum to a class of year 5 students. He describes how “The school simply hadn’t been able to find a teacher of the requisite experience in the English curriculum and we were able to fill the gap with our experienced and trained tutors”. Using online conferencing technology and an interactive whiteboard to share materials Keystone created a comprehensive programme for the class.
The feedback from parents demonstrated that the online format was no compromise. One parent whose child was in the class described how “each child had plenty of individual attention and the quality of the teaching was such that it instilled in the children a real love of learning. I highly recommend this to any school choosing to integrate Keystone tutors into their lesson plan and to any parents wanting top quality education for their children.”
According to the Education Investor, over 100,000 British teachers have already made the move overseas to teach in international schools. Finding 100,000 more over the next decade will inevitably lead to pressure on schools and no doubt an increasing cost due to the discrepancy in supply and demand. Innovative thinking and the use of rapidly evolving technology may well provide a solution.
