Tutor update for June 2017.
Hi [simplenews-subscriber:user:profile-fullname],
The school year is almost over! The local high school near me no longer has a designated final exam period, so some of my students completed their final exams back in May, while others not until the end of June. This is nice so that I don't get requests for extra sessions all on the same week and I'm able to give extra help to all my students when they need it. It's still stressful for the students as now they have projects due the same time as exams, but as always, summer break will be a welcome relief at the end of the school year.
Here's what's in this month's update:
1. Update your listing.
2. Technical issues in March.
3. Replying to e-mails on cel phones.
4. Let's get social!
1. Update your listing.
Have you updated your listing recently? Content to consider for your tutor listing in June:
Are you currently accepting students? If you aren't willing to take on desperate last minute final exam students, you should change your listing to "not accepting" (instructions how to do this below).
Will you be tutoring over the summer? State if you will be available for tutoring during the summer in your listing. Again, if not, make sure to change your listing to "not accepting."
Updating your listing places big “updated” tag in your listing. Even if there is no change to your listing, this lets potential clients know your information is current.
To update your listing, go to findAtutor.ca and click on “Log in” in the menu. If you are on a cel phone, you may have to shrink the screen to get to “Log in” at the bottom of the list. If you are having trouble logging in, click on "Request new password", enter your e-mail address, and you will be sent a link to give you direct access to your account.
Once you've logged in, click on the tab labelled “my listings”. Scroll down to the “listing information” box below your listing, and click on the “confirm listing as accurate” button. If you need to make changes, edit your listing by clicking on the “edit listing” link also located in the listing information box.
Change your listing to say "not accepting" by removing the check mark next to "accepting students" and then clicking on "confirm listing as accurate". If you want to remove the "not accepting" tag from your listing, do the same thing, except click to add the check mark next to "accepting students."
While you are there, click on your listing title to see it in a window by itself. You will see a tab above it labelled "who e-mailed." Click on this tab to check out who has e-mailed you in the past. You can check this list any time in case you may have missed noticing a message, or accidently deleted an e-mail you wanted to follow up on.
2. Technical issues in March.
March now feels like a long time ago, however I did want to address the technical issues experienced back in March.
I found myself in rural Ontario helping my dad out, when things were going terribly wrong with all our websites. James was out of the country for work, and our host provider wasn't answering their phone. I'm getting frantic e-mails from tutors wondering what was going on, I had no information, and wasn't able to post to Facebook or Twitter.
My stress level was going through the roof, and my dad asked me to drive into town to pick up a perscription for him. I took a look outside and the distraction of driving rural farm roads of Ontario druing a white-out blizzard was just the stress relief I was looking for. ;-P
EZP (our hosting company) doesn't have have customer support, so when you call, you speak with one of the computer technicians directly. Not being able to get through to technical support is highly unusual, so I knew that something major had to be going on. In a follow up e-mail EZP sent, they confirmed that there was a major power failure at the data centre, and once they knew that all technicians went to the data centre to bring everything back on-line.
A series of events and break down in communication lead to the failure, and even though most of the servers were brought back on-line quickly, 2 servers suffered damage taking about a week to repair. FindAtutor.ca was on one of those servers. EZP did an investigation into what happened and has implemented an action plan to protect their own servers, recieve notification from the data centre and means of communicating with customers if something like this ever happens again in the future.
I had my own set of circumstances that prevented communication. I'm hoping this rare event doesn't repeat itself again, but if findAtutor.ca does go down, I will do everything possible to post to Facebook and Twitter to keep everyone up to date on what is going on as we work to resolve the issue.
3. Replying to e-mails on cel phones.
Prospective clients can send e-mails to tutors using an on-line form. This e-mail is sent from findAtutor.ca, but we put the client's e-mail address in the "reply-to" line so that when the tutor replies, it goes to the original sender.
Since we did the major update last August, I've occasionally been getting e-mails from tutors replying to these messages. It seems to be most common with Android phones. However the e-mail program works on them, it doesn't seem to use the "reply-to" address.
I let the tutor know as quickly as possible that the e-mail has come to me and to resend to the original sender. We aren't able to deduce why this is happening, and it doesn't seem to happen all the time, so it may be related to phone updates, specific mail apps, or some other technical mystery.
So if you are replying to an e-mail sent via your listing on findAtutor.ca on your cel phone, check to see what address is in the "to" field. If it's to an @findatutor.ca address, it won't go to the original sender. We place the e-mail address of the sender in the .sig of the message so you can copy and paste the correct address in. If you forget, and it comes to me, I'll let you know as soon as I see the message so you can follow up with the prospective client.
4. Let's get social!
I use Twitter and Facebook to stay informed on what is going on in the world, and in contact with other people. Follow along, or use it to interact with us!
Twitter: @findatutor
Facebook: @findatutor.ca
As always, thanks for listing on findAtutor.ca!
Johanna