What is Paper Tutoring? FREE Online Tutors for Students

What is Paper Tutoring? How parents can advocate for their kids to access FREE online tutors for students in K-12th grade. Learn more about this FREE online tutor program for children. This post is sponsored by Paper. All opinions are my own.

What is Paper Tutoring? FREE Online Tutors for Students

If the pandemic has taught me anything as a mom, it’s how much I appreciate our teachers. Teaching kids is not for the faint of heart – as told by the many, many meltdowns our family experienced during the 2020 school year. And while I can only imagine the challenges our teachers are facing with in-person learning, multiply that exponentially when faced with the challenges of online learning as well.

With virtual learning not going away any time soon (thanks, COVID), our teachers and students need to navigate this difficult learning season without struggling and being left behind. But how can parents advocate for extra hours of learning and support for their kids? Insert Paper.

1-on-1 private tutoring sessions that are accessible 24/7 for parents, students and teachers. Sounds like a unicorn dream – but in reality, it’s within our fingertips. What is Paper Tutoring and how can students, parents and teachers benefit? You’re just a click away.

The Education Inequality Gap Problem

With busy parents, new learning methods, and emotionally overwhelmed kids, our family oftentimes struggles through difficult school topics. (Common Core, anyone?) And with topics sometimes building on top of previous topics – basically, I can be a mess at times trying to help my kids succeed. Add on middle school this year, those algebraic equations are confusing!

Private tutoring is EXPENSIVE. I know it. And while we as parents ALL want our kids to do well in school and succeed in every subject, sometimes our kids need help outside of the family nucleus.

By making private 1-on-1 tutoring available for ALL kids, every child can have accessibility to the help they need to succeed in school. Helping kids with socioeconomic disadvantages, busy parents unavailable to help, late night homework needs, or perhaps bridging the gap from classroom to home application, private tutoring can be the outside resource that kids can depend on for extra help.

What is Paper Tutoring?

Paper is an Educational Support System (ESS) providing students with 24/7 live help, essay review, and teachers with real-time feedback and intervention tools.

Unlimited 24/7 help
Private 1-on-1 tutoring for over 200 K-12th grade subjects
FREE for Students – no cost to parents or students to use the tutoring program
Provides support for students, parents and teachers through a secure, interactive platform
Increases personalized learning time for students without burdening teachers with an extra workload (think of the Paper tutors as qualified class helpers!)
Tutoring support provided in 4 different languages

How Does Paper Tutoring Work?

Once Paper is approved for use in your child’s school district, the Paper tutoring software is personalized and integrated into your school’s already existing online website. Your child is just a click away from the online tutoring support they need to succeed in school.

Easy login – an app is linked through your child’s school’s website, easily interfacing with the existing school software for online learning.
Fast connection – get the help needed within 15 seconds of logging in
Once connected, your child has access to private 1-on-1 tutoring with attentive tutors geared towards hands-on learning, critical thinking, essay review and skills needed to understand challenging school topics and lesson plans.
The easy-to-use student dashboard provides easy access to tutoring in their specific school subjects, a question help box for tutoring outside of their grade level topics, easy upload for sending files and documents for review, and even a fun drawing whiteboard to provide further visual support for students and tutors.
Tutors can also help students prepare for college application and scholarship application submissions, as well as help in AP and dual enrollment subjects.
Student privacy is of utmost importance. Only the student’s first name, last initial and grade level is shown to the tutors. Tutoring sessions are via chat only, no video or audio is shown in a session. A new tutor is provided each session.
Each session is logged and available to view for students, parents and teachers as long as they have the Paper program. Students are able to rate and provide feedback on their tutoring session as well.
Easing the burden for teachers, the Paper tutoring data, reports, and notes can guide teachers towards student success in class and beyond.

How is Paper Tutoring FREE for Students?

Paper partners with school districts across North America to close the achievement gap and support educational equity. Available through Title I, ESSER and GEER funds, the school district pays for a fixed cost, unlimited usage subscription for students in the district to have unlimited 24/7 access to live help, essay review and online teacher support.

Aka, students, parents and teachers do NOT pay for Paper’s private tutoring program.

Are Paper Tutors Qualified?

All potential tutor applicants are vetted by Paper – currently with over 200 qualified tutors from college age and up. These tutors are professional educator employees with a cleared background check. The tutors can help your child/parent overcome potential language barriers, currently offering tutoring support in 4 different languages including English, Spanish, French and Mandarin.

But not only can these qualified tutors assist your kids in their challenging K-12 curriculum in over 200 different topics, but these professionals are trained to help guide your student through independent learning through the Socratic method – aka not just giving out the answers, but working through the problems with critical thinking, guiding questions, collaborative efforts, and hands-on learning.

How parents can advocate for paper tutoring

How Can I Get Paper Tutoring in My School District?

Ok, so Paper tutoring sounds amazing – an answer to bridging the virtual learning challenges we are currently facing. But how can we get Paper to be available to my child, in my school district?

Talk to your school. Tell your teachers, principal and administration about Paper. Let them know about the services offered.
Talk to your district school board. Currently, Hillsborough County, Florida has Paper tutoring integrated into their school system with West Palm Beach and Orange County schools also in talks with Paper for personalized, equitable and scalable tutoring that is evidence-based. There are many opportunities for Florida and other states in North America to get involved by talking with school board district members.
Write to your state government. Let your Governor, Congressmen and State Representatives know that you would like to bridge the education equality gap with the help of Paper tutoring.
Tell your fellow parents. Paper is an easy way to have 1-on-1 tutoring available to kids in primary and secondary schools. By integrating the Paper tutoring app into the already established online school system for kids, your student can have easy access to the help they need, parents can have easy understanding of your child’s school subjects (ahem, Common Core) and teachers can have easy access to your student’s progress.