ziizoo blog

Hey, we are in the Chicago Tribune! Ziizoo garnered a mention in today’s Chicago Tribune Local edition for Romeoville. Here’s a link to the story.

Hard to believe you’re already back, and with summer still upon us, we’ll be forced to watch these golden days dwindle away through the window of a classroom……Never forget summer, a wise young lady once told me. Sorry to end the party kids, but Math and Science have been hitting the weight room and drinking protein shakes, all in preparation to kick the living ________ out of you, like, this week. You’re starting to sweat just thinking about it, or maybe it’s still 104F where you live, oh well, either way ziizoo is your 6’6″ 245 pound friend who knows Kung Fu, Krav Maga, Russian Sambo and Jiu-Jitsu and hates watching you suffer. Ziizoo is the Feydor of online tutoring. Fast, fearsome, effective and cheap.

Turn ziizoo.com loose on Calculus, Chemistry, Algebra 2, Physics, Spanish, Statistics…..you name it. Ziizoo can beat it. Want an undefeated semester? Get ziizoo.com!

Here’s a pretty cool addition to our marketing stable, the ziizoo username and password card.

Forgot your username or password? Just pull out your credit card sized, constructed of durable plastic, little reminder in your wallet or purse, and presto! No more filling out some dumb form to get your password sent to you via email which requires that you remember your username, which you forgot, or ends up in your Spam folder and you can’t find it, or you can’t read the freaking re-captcha verification word, or it makes you reset everything after you finally GET the email, none of which you don’t want to do…..basically we are saving you time and pain, provided you don’t lose it.

Looks like we saved the day, folks. The Google Mini is alive and kicking in its new home, safe and sound. So search is up and running again. Have fun!

Sorry folks, looks like search is going to be down until later tonight or tomorrow. We had to move a server and restart it in a new location; and no you aren’t crazy, it has not been working properly for the past 48 hours or so, but the team caught on and is working non-stop to get it back up and running.

Stand by……

Hey kiddos. Looks like you survived another year of highschool exams, you graduated and are heading into college life, or perhaps you are getting used to junior high and it’s almost over. What do all these things have in common? You gotta keep studying no matter what, and you gotta get help when YOU need it, not when a tutor has time. Ziizoo can help 24 hours a day. So, for most of you, tests and exams are on hold until at least late August, but summer school has just ramped up for lots of you guys. Remember, if you need help we are here ALL SUMMER LONG, 24 hours a day.

Stop by, we’ll be here.

I want to poll our online tutors but I don’t know how to post a poll (yet) well here’s the gist of it. It appears as if MOST of you tutors are logged on via remote login through GTalk; quite a few every evening, but we at ziizoo miss a lot of alerts, and there’s scads of students looking for tutors and these students end up going without help. In future versions of ziizoo, should we allow tutors to use our IM alerts (with the ziizoo admin in your buddy list) but show status as “Busy”? Should ziizoo tutors have a “Busy” button rather than just “Away or Available”? Should we here at ziizoo build that into our system? I am a proponent of this feature, and I am a proponent of adding more tutors to make our “market” more liquid.

What do you guys, our tutors, think?

Looks like exams are coming, happening now, or are over for most of you highschoolers. Schools these days have really different schedules, I have come to find out by working in the online education space. Some schools follow the standard old two semesters and you’re done model. Other schools follow a trimester schedule. Some schools have classes that last the whole year and some classes that last just a semester. It gets con-fusing for a guy who was last in grad school five years ago and for fifteen years before grad school, nada! As I interface with all the schools for ziizoo as my job, I’m often surprised by the school schedules.

What are your schools’ exam schedules like?

I came across this interesting article in today’s NYTimes.com Economix blog which asserts private colleges means higher GPAs. According to a quoted study, private colleges are behind much of the grade inflation over the last 50 years, apparently. The study, by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, uses historical data from 80 four-year colleges and universities. It finds that G.P.A.’s have risen from a national average of 2.52 in the 1950s to about 3.11 by the middle of the last decade.Based on contemporary grading data the authors collected from 160 schools, the average G.P.A. at private colleges and universities today is 3.3. At public schools, it is 3.0.

The authors suggest that these laxer grading standards may help explain why private school students are over-represented in top medical, business and law schools and certain Ph.D. programs: Admissions officers are fooled by private school students’ especially inflated grades.

At the end of this month TAKS testing will commence. In case you were wondering, TAKS is a standardized test used in Texas primary and secondary schools to assess students’ attainment of reading, writing, math, science, and social studies skills required under Texas education standards. It is developed and scored by Pearson Educational Measurement with close supervision by the Texas Education Agency. Though created before the No Child Left Behind Act was passed, it complies with the law. It replaced the previous test, called the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills or TAAS, in 2003.

We here at ziizoo want to wish you the best of luck on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skill test. We know how much you guys love standardized testing…….