Silicon Classroom Trip — Day 4
Today, we visited various edtech companies in the San Francisco and Berkeley areas. We began with the San Francisco based startup Clever which provides a standardized platform that developers can use to create education apps. Many education app developers run into the problem of how to deal with the student data management systems that vary from district to district. To address this issue, Clever does the hard work of creating an API that is compatible with a variety of these data systems used in different school districts so that the developers only have to deal with Clever as opposed to a flurry of different data formats, decreasing the tediousness of the project. We also had an illuminating discussion regarding how Clever addresses the issue of bridging the equity gap with three members of their team. Clever currently provides their services free of charge to school districts and instead charges the edtech companies that use their API. We were impressed by the mission-driven attitude and passion that Clever and its employees emanated.
Our second stop was Magoosh, a test preparation company based across the bay in Berkeley. Magoosh specializes in creating test-prep content for common college-level standardized tests such as the GRE and GMAT and, more recently, the SAT and ACT. Their team explained to us their vision in creating engaging and relevant content in order to make the test prep process less painful and more enjoyable for students.
Our final destination for the day was Remind, a San Francisco based company whose ultimate mission is to connect students, parents, and teachers in an effort to improve the educational experience through technology-facilitated communication. The app essentially allows teachers to easily send out mass texts to groups of students or parents and enables private responses to the teacher from individual recipients in a consolidated message. Remind describes themselves as “teacher-obsessed” and emphasizes the importance of understanding the needs of the teacher when building ed tech. The company also underscored the potential for the app to be applied outside of ed tech for general group communication purposes. We had the opportunity to speak with Co-founder David Kopf about his iteration process for need-finding and forming the company.
