At Empowered Readers, we believe that online tutoring using the Orton-Gillingham approach can be effective when using the right platform for teaching students. Our evaluation criteria include first and foremost effectiveness, then ease of use, cost, availability and support. We evaluated 3 mainstream platforms for distance learning to see which one would be effective for the Orton-Gillingham approach. Here are the results!
- Miro: Miro is the company that bought AwwApp and retired the platform. It offers a free 1-year term for all those who are transitioning away from AwwApp. In our evaluation, we saw challenges in pagination and keeping content hidden away from our students until they were ready to see the next page. Staging lessons was difficult and time-consuming as well. Miro works wonderfully as a collaboration whiteboard. But it is not built for online tutoring with pagination and preservation of student work per page. We ruled this one out.
- Whiteboard.chat : We were super excited to evaluate this platform advertised as “created by teachers”! This is an early-stage startup. We would like to see them move forward in their growth before we commit to using this platform. As a company, they would need to sustainably be profitable over the long term, grow a lot, and/or get acquired (exactly what happened to AwwApp!). Definitely, one to watch but not one we’re jumping on right now.
- Explain Everything: This is our choice of platform as a substitute for AwwApp going forward. The company looks rock solid. They have been in business since 2011 with offices in San Diego, New York, and Poland. We look for this type of stability when moving to platforms so that there’s minimal disruption for our students and tutors who would prefer to not keep switching platforms every few months! You can find an overview on how to use Explain Everything here, https://empoweredreaders.com/explain-everything-overview/.
Watch this video where some of our Empowered Readers team members discuss our hands-on experience with Explain Everything and Whiteboard.chat. We decided to record it and share it with anyone who may find it useful. In this video, we discuss how each one of us feels about using these two tools and where you can find additional resources to learn more about how to use these tools. Please be sure to watch this video and then keep on reading for more exciting stuff!
This video is just the first of a few that we expect to make about our experience with Explain Everything. Once everyone on our team has a reasonable amount of experience using it, we will do another review of how we feel things are going and if it is still working for us. For now, we can tell you that Shanda loves it and we hope we do as well!. We hope you enjoy our write-up and our video. Use the contact form to share with us your alternatives to AwwApp. We would love to learn more and perhaps make videos testing those platforms too!
Resources:
Whiteboard.chat Tutorial