After eight years of teaching high school English, Jeff Scheur realized there was a problem when it came to students improving their writing and teachers helping them to do so. What he saw were papers returned marked up with red ink, which left little to no impression on the students. Most of this feedback, he says, was thrown away or lost. To fix this problem, he started NoRedInk.
[ibimage==19379==Large==none==self==ibimage_align-center](Image courtesy of Jeff Scheur, right.)
Last week, Scheur and his team won first place and $75,000 at the Citi Innovation Challenge, which set out to highlight education innovation. Judges lauded the company for “extending beyond where online education has been, which is mathematics courses” as well as the personalization aspects the site offers.
Here’s how NoRedInk works: Educators can set up assignments and quizzes for students to complete in school as well as on their own time. Using students’ personal preferences, as expressed on Facebook, for example, assignments pull in characters from favorite books, movies and elsewhere in pop culture to fill in grammar. Rather than the typical Johnny and Suzy, students are likely to see cameos from Justin Bieber and Bella Swan in their homework. Scheur says this aspect of personalization helps students remember grammatical principles better. Also included in the website is a way for teachers to provide personalized feedback to students, focusing on their problem areas and assigning follow-up work where necessary.
Scheur says that the lowest average scores on standardized tests are on the writing section, and NoRedInk was born out of a response to that. “We plan to cover all aspects of the writing process, plus other areas of learning, and we already have several exciting initiatives,” he says.
Additionally, Scheur’s teaching experiences showed him that traditional feedback methods were not getting through to students. “When students receive feedback on their papers, it's hard enough for them to read it, save implement it, and I wanted to build tools to help with this process,” he says. “I think it's very important that students get immediate feedback and be able to learn in ways that engage and empower them.”
Despite functioning without marketing since launching in April 2011, NoRedInk now boasts 42,000 student and teacher users and over 1.5 million questions answered. “I think we were able to get this far without marketing because teachers and students really need what we're building,” Scheur says. Now, with additional funds and publicity, Scheur is working to bring a number of part-time employees on board full time. Between building the team by bringing on more engineers and creating more products, the prize money should prove useful.
Despite working on tools to improve our country’s education offerings, Scheur has a positive outlook on the system as a whole. Asked if he thought education in America was broken, Scheur said, “There's a lot of important work to be done in education. If we want to improve learning outcomes, we have to do a better job of supporting teachers and giving them the tools they need to be successful. I created NoRedInk to address one area where I felt technology could help teachers do their jobs better and help students improve.”
Visit NoRedInk’s website and follow them on Twitter at @no_red_ink.
