Online home-work teachers

Up until now, with both our sons in elementary school, homework had been relatively frustration-free. Oh, we've had some tears and shouting and there was the time I found an assignment with an expletive scrawled on it in a backpack but for the most part things have gone smoothly.

Now, however, the 10-year-old, Ben, is entering middle school, and our friends with older children regale us with the horrors of homework, showing the glee of a seasoned soldier telling a raw recruit about the terrors of battle. How each teacher piles on hours of the stuff. How there's barely time for after-school activities. How they can't even figure out what the questions are in math, let alone what the answers are.

Some students seem to sail through and some stumble through on their own.

For others, expensive tutors are the answer.

But one option I don't hear much about, although they seem to be proliferating, are online homework help sites.

So I hesitantly went to Google and plunged in. My first experience into the world of homework help sites left me bewildered and frustrated. How to choose among them? The Discovery Channel offers Cosmeo.com while AOL has StudyBuddy.com.

Then there is HomeworkSpot.com along with Ask for Kids (www.askforkids.com). Also, NationalGeographic.com/homework, SparkNotes.com , FigureThis.org and GrowingStars.com.

There are two main differences in online help sites those that allow a student to interact with a tutor through instant messaging and those that provide resources and techniques to help a student figure out answers to questions.

Tutor.com http://tutor.com/ and Brainfuse.com http://brainfuse.com/ are two of the major sites that give students online access to tutors; they have been around for about eight years and work primarily through libraries and schools.

For example, Tutor.com is available in 1,500 libraries in 40 states as well as some schools and boys and girls clubs. It's free to children ? libraries pay for the service.

Outside a library, a student uses a library card as a password to log onto a computer. The student then goes to the Web page, selects the grade and subject that he or she needs help with, and connects with instant-messaging-type software to a tutor ? usually a retired or current teacher, graduate student or other professional ?to ask a specific question.

The tutor uses an online classroom that includes a whiteboard to diagram and draw problems. "The idea is to help figure it out, not give the answer," said George Cigale, chief executive and founder of Tutor.com.

About 50 percent of the questions, he said, involve math.Brainfuse.com also offers online tutor help, primarily to schools through the federal No Child Left Behind legislation. If a school has failed to make adequate progress under the law for two or more years, the school can choose from a state-approved tutoring company, with Brainfuse among them, said Francesco Lecciso, director for the company.

This autumn, both Brainfuse.com and Tutor.com will also sell their services to individuals. Both will offer a free trial. As of Sept. 13, Tutor.com will offer services at $30 an hour, while Brainfuse.com has not yet decided what it will charge for an hourly and unlimited plan, Mr. Lecciso said.

Tutoring sites have also been outsourced: for example, GrowingStars.com, which charges about $25 an hour, hires tutors from India.

A more low-tech approach has been around for the last 25 years: Dial-A-Teacher (1-888-986-2345) has fielded millions of calls nationally and even internationally. The phone line is financed by the Rochester Teachers Association and open September to May, from 3:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Last year, it answered 15,000 calls.

Other homework sites help students find answers and ways of solving problems through searches. For example, AOL started its StudyBuddy.com last month.

It's a free homework site for grades K-12 with content broken down by grade ? and available to all Internet users.

StudyBuddy is different from other homework sites, said June Herold, vice president and general manager at AOL's Education and Consumer Services, because it searches only for "homework-approved Web sites" ? that is, sites that will be accepted by teachers, Ms. Herold said.

(nytimes.com)