Tutoring Technology: What Helps and What Is Sold to You
Three tools do most of the work. The rest is a sales pitch.
Tutoring companies sell platforms. Most of the platform does nothing for the student. Three things genuinely help.
What actually helps
A shared whiteboard. Both people writing on the same surface at the same time. For maths and the sciences this is the whole of online teaching, and everything else is decoration.
Recording. The one feature with no in-person equivalent. A student rewatching a worked example the night before a test gets real value, and it costs the tutor nothing.
Spaced retrieval. Any tool that puts a question in front of a student weeks after they learned it. This is the best-evidenced idea in the whole field, and a paper flashcard box does it as well as an app.
What is oversold
Dashboards. Parent portals showing hours logged and topics covered measure attendance, not learning. A student can sit through every session and improve nothing.
Adaptive question banks. Useful for drilling, and they diagnose the symptom rather than the cause. A platform can tell you a student keeps failing simultaneous equations. It cannot tell you it is because they are guessing at negative signs, which is the thing worth knowing.
Gamification. Works on younger children for a few weeks. Sixteen-year-olds preparing for the IB are not motivated by streaks.
The honest position on AI
Students use AI tools. Pretending otherwise helps nobody, so here is where they help and where they do damage.
Genuinely useful: asking for a concept to be explained a third way at midnight, generating extra practice questions on a topic, and checking whether an essay paragraph is actually answering the question asked.
Actively harmful: producing answers a student then does not understand. The feeling of having finished the work replaces the work, and the gap only surfaces in the exam hall, where it is too late.
Not negotiable: using it to write an Internal Assessment, Extended Essay or personal statement. Schools run submitted work through similarity checking, coordinators know what their students write like, and an academic honesty finding follows a student to every university that offered them a place. The consequence lands on the student.
The test we give students: could you now explain this to someone else, without the screen? If not, you have not learned it, you have watched it happen.