Announcing the Innovate NYC Schools App Challenge
blog.getclever.com
blog.getclever.com
It's currently way too hard for startups to break into the education market. Our platform takes care of some of the technical challenges (developers no longer need to build interfaces to myriad legacy systems), but getting your product into the hands of teachers & students is still tough.
That's why we're incredibly excited to support New York City on this app challenge. With Clever making it easier to write an app, and New York promising to evaluate your app, it's never been easier to get initial traction in schools with your education app.
* As someone who's been a student and taught informally before, I have some understanding of what's involved in building a small educational app focused on learning. But having never been a professional teacher, I find another area that some of this technology tackles to be unfamiliar territory: planning lessons and fostering personalized learning [3] [4]. It seems like this area is a big promise of interchange efforts like SLC and companies like Clever, but I find the problem space a little difficult to grasp as an outsider.
I think part of it is that the SLC's work necessarily involves large up-front planning that covers many domains in detail ("here's a great big interchange spec - _now_ go write real code."), which is at odds with my experience with consumer internet startups of keeping a tight focus and staying concrete.
I'm hoping the SLC Camp this weekend helps this by bringing developers and teachers together, and giving developers like me more context and a more concrete understanding of problems. I'm curious, is there any plan for such a matchmaking or collaboration event in NYC that interested devs should look out for?
* How does Clever relate to SLC? It seems similar to the aim of SLC/SLI (smooth, unified data interchange), but I see that Clever is an SLC partner [5]. How does Clever relate to SLC/SLI? I admit that the SLC/SLI documentation feels a little obtuse to an outsider - I found myself asking "...what exactly does this do?" several times while reading up on it. I much more readily grasp the Clever docs.
* Unrelated to the article: Are folks from Clever going to SLC Camp this weekend?
1 - Shared Learning Collaborative http://slcedu.org
2 - SLC Camp Bay Area http://slccampbayarea-community.eventbrite.com
3 - SLC context vignette: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERWEjWNskuE
4 - SLC context vignette: http://slcedu.org/blog/introducing-mr-thompson
* How does a dev (who hasn't been in education) know what to build?
NYC has put together some great initial resources to help orient developers without educational backgrounds on what they're looking for: http://nycschools.challengepost.com/details/needs_opportunit... http://nycschools.challengepost.com/details/resources
I'm not aware of any specific events for this challenge to connect teachers & developers, but EdTech meetups (http://www.meetup.com/NYEdTech/ http://www.meetup.com/sfedtech/ http://www.meetup.com/EdTechMeetupCO/) are great ways to meet interested teachers in finding and building better technical tools.
* How does Clever relate to SLC?
SLC is great for the districts that use it. We're proud to support them. But for the vast majority of districts out there that don't have SLC, Clever can help them open up their data in under 5 minutes.
* Will Clever be at SLC Camp?
I'm not sure if we'll make it for the entire weekend, but we'll definitely be around. Come say hi!
I wrote some database software that took a lot of the hurt out of the process. Pop in the data in CSV format and it crunches all of the numbers and connects all the dots. That said, the whole workflow is still a bit of a pain. Most of the data is locked up in silos lacking any sort of API, but sporting a user interface that compels a little piece of my soul to shrivel up every time I have to log in and download the CSVs. Additionally, I have to bother the school support staff because I don't even have access to some of the data. Each different data source requires me to write a different parser. In the mean time, I still have to plan lessons and teach kids.
I've kicked the tires on the Clever API and it's fantastic for my purposes. They've done some incredibly cool stuff to make it easy to access data I've previously struggled to get my hands on. I'm really excited about the work they're doing and super-excited for more partners to come on board and use their API. It's going to change the way we deal with student data and ultimately get quicker information out to our teachers so that they can make better instructional decisions for our students.