Many know I’ve left architecture for the time being and work full time at a education start-up. My role ranges from strategic partnerships to marketing material to user interface design. I just finished this animation about out new free product for teachers. With a bit of sweat, I think we’ll replace Scantron forever.
I’m proud to be working on a product that can actually improve the quality of education. When teachers get instant feedback in the classroom, they can adjust teaching based on what the students do and do not know. This makes a huge difference.
The two main types of tests are “formative assessment” and “summative assessment”. A summative assessment (assessment = test in this context ) is a test you receive at the end of a learning period. This is the tests we’re all familiar with. You get a grade and your grade in the class reflects the score.
There’s a big push in education now for formative assessment, although the term is often misused. Formative assessments are given on a regular basis and are used so that the teacher knows what the students know. The point of a formative assessment is not to give the student a grade, it’s for the teacher to keep their finger on the pulse of the learning process. If everyone already knows ‘x’ but doesn’t know ‘y’, then the teacher should focus on teaching ‘y’. Without formative assessments, a teacher has a hard time keeping track of where students are at.
But here’s the tricky part.. testing means taking the time to grade and means data entry into gradebooks. If a middle school teacher has 6 classes with 30 students each, grading one assignment per day would mean 900 pieces of paper to grade in a week. And to make that worse, if you want to add that info to a gradebook, that’s 900 pieces of data entry to put in a spreadsheet. This creates an untenable situation for the teacher.
That’s why my mom came up with the idea for GradeCam. She was teaching 7th grade at the time and overwhelmed with data entry. She went back to college as a non traditional student to leave secretarial work and become a teacher… only to spend her weekends doing tedious data entry. Luckily my brother is a programming genius and wrote the software.
Now I’m working on making GradeCam available to all teachers everywhere.
We’re releasing a free teacher edition next week and a new website will be launching in just a few days.