PREMIUM CONTENT:
Jan 18, 2013
Startups & Venture Capital
BetterLesson: Connecting teachers worldwide
Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal
Alex Grodd
has been there: In his time as a sixth grade teacher, he spent many
nights crafting lesson plans from scratch, finding that information
culled online was only peripherally useful.
And, much as he wanted to connect with other educators, he didn’t know how — phone banking, email lists and meet-up groups proved inefficient.
All this ultimately inspired him to found Cambridge-based BetterLesson. The startup provides a free, worldwide networking site that allows teachers to share lesson plans and resources, exchange and critique ideas, and ask and answer constructive questions.
“Teaching is the hardest job in the world,” said Grodd, BetterLesson’s CEO, who taught sixth grade for the Atlanta Public Schools and Roxbury Preparatory Charter School. “We’re trying to make it more sustainable, and have teachers be able to focus on the things that they should be focused on.”
Since its founding in 2008, the nine-employee company has cultivated a user base of 175,000 educators — with about 10 percent of its traffic international — and has grown to include more than 1 million teacher-generated resources. It’s backed by $2.7 million from Highland Capital Partners, General Catalyst Partners, NewSchools Venture Fund and New Markets Venture Partners, along with angel investors.
BetterLesson also recently received a $3.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The need for sharing resources among educators is clear, said Grodd — teachers spend “inordinate amounts of time reinventing the wheel.” By allowing them to connect and share their best teaching tools, tips, and resources, the company’s goal is to ultimately foster — and improve — education.
“Teachers have a lot of great ideas and sometimes they’re not shared for many reasons,” said David Kujawski, a sixth grade science teacher at Walpole’s Bird Middle School. Teaching can be “insular,” but the site has “dismantled some of those obstacles for the greater good of teaching and learning,” he added.
An active member, as well as a curator of the site, Kujawski said he likes being able to reach out globally, bounce ideas off other teachers, and communicate directly with the educators who write lesson plans he finds useful.
Such free exchange of ideas “revolutionizes” instruction, he said, making teaching easier, more efficient and, ultimately, more rewarding.
“This has immediate impacts on the quality of education that our students receive,” he said.
As the site moves forward, the goal is to build out interfaces and features to accommodate educational standards that are part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, Grodd said. The site also aims to provide more matchmaking and social elements eventually, he said.
Although the majority of services are free, the site also offers premium features that incorporate such services as professional development, custom branding, analytics, and privacy permissions — allowing individual districts and organizations to privately share, rate and curate curriculum and lessons.
Original story link here.
And, much as he wanted to connect with other educators, he didn’t know how — phone banking, email lists and meet-up groups proved inefficient.
All this ultimately inspired him to found Cambridge-based BetterLesson. The startup provides a free, worldwide networking site that allows teachers to share lesson plans and resources, exchange and critique ideas, and ask and answer constructive questions.
“Teaching is the hardest job in the world,” said Grodd, BetterLesson’s CEO, who taught sixth grade for the Atlanta Public Schools and Roxbury Preparatory Charter School. “We’re trying to make it more sustainable, and have teachers be able to focus on the things that they should be focused on.”
Since its founding in 2008, the nine-employee company has cultivated a user base of 175,000 educators — with about 10 percent of its traffic international — and has grown to include more than 1 million teacher-generated resources. It’s backed by $2.7 million from Highland Capital Partners, General Catalyst Partners, NewSchools Venture Fund and New Markets Venture Partners, along with angel investors.
BetterLesson also recently received a $3.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The need for sharing resources among educators is clear, said Grodd — teachers spend “inordinate amounts of time reinventing the wheel.” By allowing them to connect and share their best teaching tools, tips, and resources, the company’s goal is to ultimately foster — and improve — education.
“Teachers have a lot of great ideas and sometimes they’re not shared for many reasons,” said David Kujawski, a sixth grade science teacher at Walpole’s Bird Middle School. Teaching can be “insular,” but the site has “dismantled some of those obstacles for the greater good of teaching and learning,” he added.
An active member, as well as a curator of the site, Kujawski said he likes being able to reach out globally, bounce ideas off other teachers, and communicate directly with the educators who write lesson plans he finds useful.
Such free exchange of ideas “revolutionizes” instruction, he said, making teaching easier, more efficient and, ultimately, more rewarding.
“This has immediate impacts on the quality of education that our students receive,” he said.
As the site moves forward, the goal is to build out interfaces and features to accommodate educational standards that are part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, Grodd said. The site also aims to provide more matchmaking and social elements eventually, he said.
Although the majority of services are free, the site also offers premium features that incorporate such services as professional development, custom branding, analytics, and privacy permissions — allowing individual districts and organizations to privately share, rate and curate curriculum and lessons.
Original story link here.
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