Solutions · By outcome
Save time
These are the problems that eat the hours around teaching: setup, scheduling, admin, reporting and chasing people. Here’s every one, by who feels it, and how Pencil Spaces solves it.
Free for 2 weeks on any paid plan. No credit card required.
Who
Program leaders, Tutors, Students, Parents
Problems mapped
61
Today
56 solved, 4 partly solved, 1 coming soon
Program leaders
- Security reviews and RFPs take months
- Switching platforms mid-year is risky
- One setup has to fit every role and site
- Rosters fall out of step with the SIS
- Logins fail, young children most of all
- The same data entered in several systems
- School networks and devices block lessons
- Launching a term or a site takes weeks
- Vendors slow to fix or build what you need
- Hard to judge teaching skill before hiring
- Matching students to tutors by hand
- Availability lives in a dozen places
- Building a term’s schedule takes days
- Every change ripples through by hand
- Finding a substitute in time
- No control over who changes the schedule
- No live view across every lesson
- Help requests pile up during lessons
- Getting the right materials to every tutor
- Too few lessons are ever observed
- Coaches can’t give every tutor feedback
- Children alone online with adults, unseen
- No evidence when a complaint comes in
- Student data under COPPA, FERPA and GDPR
- Proving compliance to every district
- Attendance entered and fixed by hand
- Reports stitched together from many systems
- Research takes months of data wrangling
- Families hear little about each lesson
- Questions and complaints get lost
- Overhead grows with every new site
- Tutor pay rebuilt from timesheets
- Invoices don’t match lessons delivered
Tutors
- Slow hiring and repeated clearances
- Learning the tools in front of students
- Keeping availability current every week
- Clashing calendars across programs
- Hearing about changes too late
- No buffer between back-to-back lessons
- Deciding what each student needs next
- Hours spent finding and making materials
- Rebuilding the board before every lesson
- Hunting for links and logins
- Students late, locked out or lost
- Running out of time, ending late
- Hours lost to grading homework
- Remembering where each student left off
- Keeping parents updated takes time
- No one to reach mid-lesson
- Logging attendance after every lesson
- Writing notes and reports by hand
- Submitting and fixing timesheets
- Mandatory training and sign-offs pile up
- A different login and tool for each program
Students
Parents
See it in a live Space.
We’ll walk you through it, shaped around how you teach.
