Spires uses the Messenger of Facebook, the phone system of Uber, Lessonspace for a full digital classroom and a proprietary email and file sharing system.

It's high-tech, free (including international phone calls) and should allow you to do everything you need to tutor online successfully.

Watch our video and read the text below to find out more:

As part of the terms of using Spires, you cannot exchange private or contact details with clients introduced by Spires such as phone numbers, email addresses, PayPal accounts or social media links. Our house rules explain our basic terms in more detail.

There are four simple ways to communicate with students using the Messages tab.

You can chat with a student if you have bid on their job or have been contacted by them through our website. A green tick by the message means they have seen it (or at least their messenger was open when you sent it).

Messages are sent by emails if the recipient is not online or has not read them within five minutes of you sending it. The recipient can reply to the email, or visit Spires messenger to reply. Their reply will appear in your messenger, and be emailed to you if you have not seen it in 5 minutes, etc.

Clients and Tutors are invited to add their phone numbers privately and securely on Spires in their settings. Once they do, other people will see a call button within the messenger and on their profile on Spires. Pressing it will call their phone directly from your browser, or vice versa. The person being called will see an anonymous routing number beginning 01225 (Bath, UK). All phone numbers are kept private from other users and we would never share your contact details with a 3rd party.

You can read more about how phone calls work and how to change your number in our article on the phone calling system.

Once you are communicating with a student, the next step is to schedule classes.

These can be booked as either either paid or free classes using the schedule class button. See the guide on having classes on Spires for more information.

There is a share file button in the messenger where you can upload files, you will also see a green tick if the file is actually opened. The maximum file size is 100 MB.

Spires has a built in whiteboard based around Bitpaper. In the messenger, between the share file and schedule class button there will be a whiteboard button:

Which you can use to create your whiteboards and open whiteboards you have already made. You can then click on the link to open the whiteboard:

To learn more about how to create and manage whiteboards please see our article here

NEXT: Read on to learn more about the Spires phone calling system