My Town Tutors is making a huge commitment for the 2014 – 2015 school year to be the #1 tutoring resource for parents and teachers in America. Our motto is “Teachers are great tutors!” Parents love the fact that every teacher in our directory is a teacher!
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Author Bio: Dr. Adam Wootton (http://adamwootton.com) Adam founded ZumFun (http://zumfun.com) with a passionate belief that learning is fun, and he is building the apps and games to keep it that way. He has worked in many countries around the world and now calls NYC home. He leads the small and dedicated team at ZumFun to build fun learning apps like Exam Elf.
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Standardized mathematics testing is used heavily in schools to grade students, determine entry into schools and allocate resources. As the importance of the tests increase, parents invest in test preparation and tutors to give their children an advantage. However, these courses are expensive and some of them offer dubious value for money.
Doing well at exams is not just a matter of knowing the content; it is also knowing how to do an exam. Students who are nervous, unprepared or just overwhelmed by a new experience are not able to effectively apply their knowledge in an exam. Similar to a sporting event, students can train to learn the skills needed to perform to their full potential in exams.
At ZumFun, we focus on making learning fun. Our research has identified 12 different skills that can be learned to perform better in examinations. They fall into 2 categories:
Specific Skills |
Experience Skills |
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Time Management |
Exam usability |
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Focus & Recovery |
Answer sheet usage |
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Checking your work |
Eraser usage |
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Trick Questions |
Number management |
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Question Strategies |
Attention span |
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Exam Strategies |
Question familiarity |
These skills can be learned through trial and error, by doing many practice exams over and over. Making such learning fun, we developed a free App called Exam Elf (http://examelf.com) that teaches students these skills in a fun, game environment. Students earn belts, stars and brains as they progress, and this motivates them to achieve
their goals.
Parents can interact with the students to give them high fives, send encouragement messages and monitor progress. They can also see a comprehensive dashboard on student strengths and weaknesses.
The fun characters work with you to learn and there are strong male and female role models in the game.
Our goal is that, in the future, students will head into exams confident that they have the skills needed to perform to their maximum potential in the exam. Exam Elf is free, but we will be charging for some of the parent reporting features in the future. However, for readers of this blog, we have created a free code that will unlock everything in Exam Elf permanently. Just enter the code: MyTownTutors and you will become one of our premium early adopters.
Exam Elf has had great reviews from teachers. Please read some here (http://ilovemyclassroom.blogspot.com/2014/06/exam-elf-app.html) and here (http://4thgraderacers.blogspot.com/2014/05/techy-talk-exam-elf-app.html).
We would love to hear your feedback, and if you like Exam Elf – please give us a 5 star review in the App Store!
Download Exam Elf here(https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/exam-elf/id839687025?mt=8).