The Harold Washington Library was a quite fitting setting for the 630 educators who came together for the day of edtech demos and discussions that made up the First Annual Education Technology Startup Collaborative User Conference.
Thursday’s conference wasn’t about entrepreneurs talking at teachers about ways to improve their classroom’s technology, but about creating organic conversations between the users and the creators of edtech tools.
“Entrepreneurs don't know more about being in the trenches than teachers, but they have the tools to make them do their jobs better,” Chris Liang-Vergara of FirstLine Schools said in his morning keynote. “If we don't give entrepreneurs feedback, then later new technology will be pushed down our throats.”
[ibimage==26163==Large==none==self==ibimage_align-center]
Amy Lin of Edcanvas demos her product with a table of educators Thursday.
ThinkCERCA’s Abby Ross and Eileen Murphy were the masterminds behind the roundtable-style conference and say they got the idea from attending events like SXSW LaunchEDU and also from their own conversations with educators.
“ThinkCERCA has really benefitted from testing our product in schools with students and teachers,” Ross said. “Bringing educators and entrepreneurs together for a user conference seemed like the type of event that could really start a movement that we can accomplish greatness when we work together.”
Teachers and administrators got a chance to actually demo the tools that were presented to them by entrepreneurs: about 30 startups gave 3-minute pitches and, afterwards, conducted roundtable demos and discussions with teachers. Teachers could give entrepreneurs their feedback in person or through online surveys at any point in the day.
Among the 30 startups that presented were:
- ThinkCERCA, a Chicago-based platform for educators to deliver personalized instruction
- Chicago-based classroom management and student engagement app Youtopia
- Californian startup Edcanvas, which allows educators to teach all digital content by dragging-and-dropping it into one “canvas”
- New York City-based Newsela, which takes a news article and rewrites it at five different reading levels, so that students at variety of levels can engage in the same content
- San Francisco-based Class Dojo, which helps teachers manage behavior and reward positive behavior
- Bloomboard, a Palo Alto-based Amazon for educators’ professional development
But educators didn’t just have the chance to engage with startups during the day, but also got to discuss theirs general anxieties about integration of edtech into classrooms. Attendee Candace Marcotte, a technology facilitator at Glenview Public School District, said one of her continued concerns throughout her work in edtech is that teachers may get caught up in “hot new tools” without thinking of the greater purpose of furthering student learning.
Over lunch, additional worries were discussed when The Starter League’s Neal Sales-Griffin and a 13-year-old ChicagoQuest student addressed the crowd. One audience member said that with so much integration of technology in the classroom, students no longer know how to not use technology.
The Quest student’s reply drew vigorous nods of agreement from entrepreneurs and educators alike: "It's a good skill to know when to use technology and it's a good skill to know when to not use technology."
This sort of discussion and collaboration between the startup and education communities will be an annual and nationwide event, Ross said.
“Our immediate next step is to follow up with all the attendees,” Ross said. “And then to start planning how we can expand and improve for both educators and startups!”
