Tutor update for September 2020
Hi [simplenews-subscriber:user:profile-fullname]!
Last week we helped our daughter move back to her apartment for university. School doesn’t start until next week here in BC, everyone is eagerly awaiting to find out what their new schedules will be. I keep watching the news to see what is happening with school. My main takeaway is, be prepared to be flexible.
Here's what's in this month's update:
1. Update your listing.
2. Add your preferred name. (Some things may look a little different.)
3. Bonus listing time ending on September 30th.
4. Listings: now with emojis!
5. Follow us on social media!
1. Update your listing.
Back in July, life was starting to look almost “normal.” I would walk past restaurants and businesses busy with customers, and generally noticing people seeming much more relaxed. James was encouraged to go back to working in the office, rush hour traffic was becoming a thing again. I was thinking that I just might go back to tutoring in-person again, or at least do a hybrid of some in-person, some on-line if more convenient.
And then cases started climbing. And there was outcry about schools reopening, and then they delayed opening up schools again, and cases of Covid-19 continue to grow. I think for everyone’s safety, on-line tutoring is going to be my default for the foreseeable future. I’ve already communicated with my returning students and their parents, and everyone is in agreement.
High school in BC is going to be a quad-mester system, where students take 2 courses for 10 weeks at a time. It’s going to be learning by firehose, with lots of curriculum to plow through and new material to absorb. Being there for students in this compressed time is important, as they don’t have the luxury of delaying understanding material. Take into consideration what is happening in your local schools when updating your listing:
Say in your listing what extra precautions you are taking to keep students safe. If you are tutoring on-line, make sure you specifically mention it in your listing. If you meet in person say whether you require the student to wear a mask, or if you’ll be making accommodations to keep a 2 metre distance.
Communication is critical. Test sending yourself an e-mail using the envelope icon in your listing and make sure that it’s getting through to you. Update any spam filters so that they don’t accidentally get sent to the spam folder. And reply promptly! See below how you can check who has sent you an e-mail in the past.
Remember that updating your listing places a big “updated” tag in your listing. This makes your listing stand out more in the list and lets prospective clients know that the information is recent and up to date.
Take a couple minutes to update your listing now!
Login to your account, by going to findAtutor.ca and clicking on "login" 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 menu list. Remember that your user name is "Anonymous" (do NOT include the quotes). If you can't remember your password, click on "Request new password", enter your e-mail address, and you will be sent a link to give you access to your account. NOTE: to login you must type both your username and password in exactly. Many tutors are convinced that their new passwords aren't being saved properly when it's the username they are entering in wrong. Remember that the "password reset" feature will give you access to your account using your e-mail address instead.
Update your listing after you login by clicking 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."
Check who e-mailed you by clicking on your listing title. This places your listing in a screen by itself and 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 accidentally deleted an e-mail you wanted to follow up on.
2. Add your preferred name. (Some things may look a little different.)
When you login, you may notice there are fewer tabs than usual, and maybe a mysterious new one you haven’t noticed before. I’ve mentioned in previous e-mails we’re working on something new.
As part of the upcoming launch, we’ve added a new field in user accounts where you can put in your preferred name. Right now we only gather your full name, which is a little awkward for addressing e-mails (see the top of this e-mail for example). The preferred name is the name that you usually go by with friends and family, or what you go by in a teacher/student setting.
Your preferred name will be used in e-mails to you, and provided to students/parents so they know what to call you without having to give out your full real name. You can choose how formal or informal you would like it to be.
To add your preferred name, after you login to findAtutor.ca, click on the “edit” tab. Just below the tab, there will be a link to “Personal information.” The second field is “preferred name,” enter what name you want to go by, then scroll to the bottom of the page can click the “save” button. Check that your alternate e-mail is still correct, and if you haven't supplied one, now is the perfect time to include one.
While you are there, you want to check your “profile” field, which is the very first field. It should be set to “tutor.” You would have selected your profile when you first created an account on findAtutor.ca, I would expect since you have a tutor listing you would have selected tutor, but you could have selected anything.
As part of development of new features, we’ve had to add new tabs, and , it was starting to get cluttered with all users seeing all tabs. The profile determines what tabs you see. If you find the “my listings” tab missing from your account, you just need to change your account profile. If you are feeling lost about how to change this, feel free to reply to this e-mail, and I can change the profile setting of your account for you.
If you’ve had side ads previously, you will notice the tab labelled “my ads” missing. Not to worry, you can find your old side ads by going to the black menu bar, and under “account” you will find “my ads.”
We thought we’d be ready to launch the new features on the long weekend, but as always, we couldn’t quite get everything done, and need to do some more testing to get to a minimal viable product before officially launching. Although we’ll likely be sending out information within the next week, it’s a good idea to get your account information up to date so you’ll be ready for what we have in store.
3. Bonus listing time ending September 30th.
I meant to end this awhile ago, but I did promise I’d give warning before removing the bonus listing time. So you’ll continue to get an extra 2 month listing time for 6 month or 1 year listing renewals, or 4 months for 2 year renewals. As long as your order is created before September 30th, you’ll get the extra listing time, after that, you’ll get the normal amount of listing time.
4. Listings: now with emojis!
In about mid August a tutor created and paid for a listing that was missing required information. I couldn’t figure out how they did that. As an administrator I can override many things, but the software won’t even let me create or save a listing without the required fields being filled in. I thought it was a weird glitch, or something corrupt on the device the tutor was using. I was encouraging them to edit their listing put the required information in.
Then less than a week later, it happened again with a different tutor. How is this even possible? There had been multiple other tutors that had created new listings with no problem in the intervening days, so what is going on with these 2 listings? I decided to go to the activity log to take a look back at when the tutors were on-line to see if I could gather extra information. What I noticed right away is that my just going to a page to look at the listings was producing a long list of errors. Of course I discover this while James is helping out daughter move, so I’m texting him, and he’s taking a look with his laptop.
He determined that the entries for those listings in the database somehow got corrupted, so nothing can be done until we go in and manually fix it. It had to wait until he got back the next day, but we still couldn’t figured out what caused it in the first place. So I took at a look at all the activity of the 2 users with the problematic listings, and saw the very first error message where they initially created their listing. I was able to see all the content entered, and it was a complete well thought out and informative listing, why wasn’t it saved? And wait...why is there an emoji there? Could adding an emoji cause this?
I went to the test site, and tried creating a new listing with an emoji, and it created a completely blank listing that I was no longer able to edit or change in anyway, and created a corrupt entry in the database! I panicked wondering how often this has happened for other tutors in the past, and amazingly I only found one other instance over 2 years ago, but they had created a new listing without emojis, so the emoji error listing never came to my attention.
Phew, once we knew what the cause of the problem was, then we could go about fixing it. The next day I talked with James about it, and it was concerns over this type of thing happening is why we don’t allow HTML in listings, so by “fixing” it, I thought that James would strip out any emojis entered into listings.
So later when he said to me “I fixed it! I even added a smiley face to your listing!” he wasn’t expecting the expression on my face at delivering that news because he immediately followed saying “Don’t worry...I took it back out again.”
Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against emojis, it’s just that I wasn’t expecting him to make it so that emojis could be included in listings, but now they are! As James said to me, why not add emojis, emojis are fun!
So, add some flare to your listing by adding some emojis!
5. Follow us on social media!
I recently was checking out some things on Twitter, and discovered that somehow the findAtutor Twitter account had restrictions on it so only approved followers could see what I was tweeting. I’ve changed it so that tweets can be read far and wide by everyone!
We’ll be making big announcements soon, and you’ll see it first on social media. So follow, post or @ us here:
Twitter: @findatutor
Facebook: @findatutor.ca
Thank you as always for listing on findAtutor.ca.
Stay safe and healthy,
Johanna