Can Tech Innovation help public schools?
Boston’s Innovation Economy has a great startup culture and entrepreneurial environment. But, with so many of these startups focused on delivering products and services around Marketing and Sales, it gets a little tiring. I’m just not interested in hearing about the next new business model that sits on top of Twitter. Imagine my delight when I met up with Alex Grodd, Founder at BetterLesson, “an organizational and sharing platform that allows educators to lesson plan more efficiently and effectively, giving warranted focus to creating innovative content, delivering innovative content, grading, tutoring, analyzing data, communicating with parents, and finishing paperwork.” I sat down with Alex to hear about the company he founded.
Mamet: What is BetterLesson and what prompted you to start it?
Grodd: BetterLesson is a social network that helps teachers connect and share lessons, best practices, and ideas. I started BetterLesson in response to the frustrations that I experienced while teaching 6th grade in Atlanta and Boston public schools. During my time in the classroom, I found myself constantly searching for lessons on the Internet and usually coming up short. As a result, I would spend inordinate amounts of time ‘reinventing the wheel,’ creating lessons from scratch the night before delivering them. After creating a series of effective lessons, I had no good way to share them with colleagues in my school and district. I created BetterLesson to throw a wrench in this cycle, which was taking a serious toll on my instruction and morale.
Mamet: What’s happened since you launched it? things you were hoping for? Things you didn’t expect? any stats you can share with us?
Grodd: We officially launched our beta site in August and have seen really exciting growth and traction. In less than three months, we have over 2,500 registered users from over 100 schools and districts. These teachers have contributed more than 12,000 resources to the site. That being said, we still have a lot of work ahead of us and are excited to continue iterating around the user experience. We have some exciting features and UI enhancements coming up over the next few weeks and months that will hopefully have a large impact on our community-building efforts.
Mamet: In your former life, you were a 6th grade teacher. How do you see technology and public education blending to change education?
Grodd: I’ve been working on BetterLesson full-time for over a year now (I was teaching full-time until July 2008). There’s a great deal of literature on the role that technology could/should play in education. I’ll list a few areas I’m excited about:
- I (clearly) think technology can play a powerful role in scaling effective content and practices to teachers and students across the globe.
- Technology can play a really powerful role in helping teachers deliver differentiated instruction that targets their students’ unique learning needs and styles. There are many effective instructional video games and applications that create specialized learning programs based on each student’s unique talents, abilities, and needs.
- There are a number of K-12 tools and systems (the gradebook is a good example) that have evolved very little over the past 50 years and are ripe for a big disruption.
- Technology offers many exciting ways to collect and harness student data.
These are just a few…Education is a very fertile frontier for technology.
Mamet: What are some of the obstacles to bringing new technology into the public system and how are you overcoming them?
Grodd: There are many obstacles to bringing technology to K-12 schools. Many schools districts have outdated technical infrastructures. When we train teachers on ways to use BetterLesson, we see a lot of IE6 and outdated Flash, etc. We do our best to help schools and teachers upgrade their technology. Another major hurdle is that the predominant K-12 business model involves big companies selling big products to school districts via an extremely long and inefficient sales cycle. Our solution is to take an entirely new, bottom-up approach and go straight to the teachers.
Mamet: What does the future hold for BetterLesson? What next big steps should we be on the lookout for?
Grodd: Our most important milestone is to build a platform where teachers can quickly and easily find high-quality content and connect with their peers. To get there, we’re working on a number of exciting UI enhancements: a new UI focused on ‘findablility’, more powerful search, better recognition of high-quality content and high-performing teachers, and an enhanced newsfeed and commenting system. We’re also beginning to grow our marketing and outreach efforts. There’s a lot of work ahead, and we’re excited to get after it.
