I recently got to go see a talk by Chris Hadfield held during the BC Association of Professional Engineer's annual conference. Chris Hadfield has a degree in Engineering, and there were many engineering students in attendance to the talk. Someone asked him “What was the most important thing you learned studying engineering?”
As August begins, there is a bitter sweet feeling of knowing that summer is half over, and back-to-school sales start. The last week of August means, if you've been procrastinating, living in denial or just enjoying your summer so much you forgot, NOW is the time to get ready for school.
Just like students are stocking up on supplies and new clothes, tutors are cleaning out their offices, setting up their schedule, and getting ready to start tutoring for the new school year.
I've started getting e-mails from tutors asking if they should be concerned about the Heartbleed bug affecting their accounts on findAtutor.ca. The short answer is no.
This bug is related to the OpenSSL security certificate. SSL certificates are only used on secure pages. You can tell which pages are secure because there will be an "https" at the beginning of an URL.
We will be entering a team in the Vancouver Science Fair 5K fun run again this year. It will take place on the morning of Sunday May 25th, 2014. This is a fun family event, and everyone is welcome to join our team!
In addition to participation in the event, registration includes a technical shirt and admittance to Science World afterwards! We will give $15 back to each team member when they show up on race day as well!
Back in early 2003, I was feeling frustrated about advertising my tutoring services. A couple years earlier I helped a tutoring friend by driving her around to all the local high schools to put posters up. She put posters and business cards everywhere she could to get her business going. Within a year, she had so many phone calls coming in that she stopped answering her phone altogether. Although the posters likely were taken down, her name had been added to so many lists that no one bothered to update to make current, that she had absolutely no control over her contact information.
A few years ago I was contacted by a blind tutor that was having difficulty using findAtutor.ca. I was asked to include an audio Captcha (you know, that annoying picture of random letters and characters you are forced to enter to confirm you are a real person and not a spamming computer robot) to make the website more accessible.
We will have a findAtutor.ca team in the 2013 Vancouver Science Fair Fun Run.
This 5K timed run will be in Vancouver on Sunday May 26th. We will give $15 to each participant that signs up with our team
(you have to show up on race day to get your money, how's that for incentive!) Everyone is welcome, so invite your family, friends and collegues to join the team as well!
In the wee-hours of November 5th, findAtutor.ca was moved to a new more reliable server. Unless you were actually on the website trying to use it around 1 am PST on November 5th, the move was unnoticeable to visitors. Only a few admistrative behind the scenes changes needed to be made in the days following the move.
Running findAtutor.ca over the years has been a learning experience for me. There are so many new subject areas that I've never considered before that I've learned about. It's been many years since I've added a new subject, I figured that I've pretty much covered them all, and then a welding tutor signs up.
Welcome back to school, for most students across the country. September is a time of great change for students and families, and media focuses a great deal on education at this time of year.
The Tyee, a BC independent on-line magazine, ran an article about tutoring: "Does the Tutor 'Advantage' Really Add Up?” It doesn't really make any conclusions, but does take a balanced look at both the pros and cons of tutoring.