By Janet Menosky Smith
I’ve had a few travel scenarios that presented major challenges I needed to overcome, to successfully meet my students.
One particular situation helped me discover a go-to hack I can use when the internet reception is lousy...
A close family member had a serious medical issue while staying at their summer cottage on a lake about three hours from my home. I needed to help them find the right provider for treatment and help until they were on their feet again.
With my tutoring tote packed, I arrived and discovered that there was no internet service at the cottage and poor cell phone reception. Plan A (use the household internet and Plan B (use my hotspot at the house) were dashed immediately.
On to plan C – find a convenient local spot with good internet. I found a coffee shop with decent Wi-Fi (35 MB download and 20 MB upload.) It also had a nice upstairs room to work in.
This spot worked well for my early morning student. However, when I would arrive for any tutoring after 11 a.m., the room was filled with other online coffee drinkers.
Sometimes I couldn’t find a private table and had to beg-explain to someone that I would be tutoring, and would it be okay if I sat at their table.
Also, with so many others using the connection, the available bandwidth often was seriously diminished. The cell reception was weak enough there also that my hotspot wasn’t any better.
A few times the available signal was so weak, that I while I could connect with the student, there was terrible lagging and audio. First, we tried turning off just our video cameras, but the sound quality was still poor.
Finally, we both had to turn off our sound AND video to stop the on-screen lagging. We used our cell phones for sound and just went without seeing each other.
Not ideal, but it did work, and we were able to tutor. That’s an emergency tutoring hack you can tuck away in your tutoring tip box in case you need it someday!
For the week that I was there, no other good options were available, and I just had to make do with my coffee shop office.
It wasn’t ideal, but at least I enjoyed some delicious lattes!
Yours in reaching & teaching,
Janet
I’ve had a few travel scenarios that presented major challenges I needed to overcome, to successfully meet my students.
One particular situation helped me discover a go-to hack I can use when the internet reception is lousy...
A close family member had a serious medical issue while staying at their summer cottage on a lake about three hours from my home. I needed to help them find the right provider for treatment and help until they were on their feet again.
With my tutoring tote packed, I arrived and discovered that there was no internet service at the cottage and poor cell phone reception. Plan A (use the household internet and Plan B (use my hotspot at the house) were dashed immediately.
On to plan C – find a convenient local spot with good internet. I found a coffee shop with decent Wi-Fi (35 MB download and 20 MB upload.) It also had a nice upstairs room to work in.
This spot worked well for my early morning student. However, when I would arrive for any tutoring after 11 a.m., the room was filled with other online coffee drinkers.
Sometimes I couldn’t find a private table and had to beg-explain to someone that I would be tutoring, and would it be okay if I sat at their table.
Also, with so many others using the connection, the available bandwidth often was seriously diminished. The cell reception was weak enough there also that my hotspot wasn’t any better.
A few times the available signal was so weak, that I while I could connect with the student, there was terrible lagging and audio. First, we tried turning off just our video cameras, but the sound quality was still poor.
Finally, we both had to turn off our sound AND video to stop the on-screen lagging. We used our cell phones for sound and just went without seeing each other.
Not ideal, but it did work, and we were able to tutor. That’s an emergency tutoring hack you can tuck away in your tutoring tip box in case you need it someday!
For the week that I was there, no other good options were available, and I just had to make do with my coffee shop office.
It wasn’t ideal, but at least I enjoyed some delicious lattes!
Yours in reaching & teaching,
Janet
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