Classkick

There is a familiar shape to education technology, which is that someone builds a product to fix a problem teachers have, and then teachers discover the product is itself the problem. Andrew Rowland lived this shape. He taught high-school math with Teach for America on Chicago's west side, where his students called him "Mr. Roro," and he noticed that the tools meant to save him time mostly took it. Online grading systems were slower than paper. Feedback arrived after the test, which is to say, after the exact moment a student might have used it.

So Rowland did the thing that is easy to say and hard to do: he left, learned computer science, and went to work at Google and YouTube. Then he did the harder thing, which is that he left those jobs too. In the fall of 2014 he launched Classkick, an app built on a premise so plain it sounds like a slogan, because it is one: more tries for kids every day.

The mechanic is worth pausing on, because it inverts the usual pitch. Most classroom software wants to capture what happened - a score, a submission, a record for the gradebook. Classkick wants to be present while it is happening. A teacher builds or imports an assignment, students work on individual digital canvases, and the teacher watches the answers appear live, in real time, across the whole room. When a student is stuck, the teacher draws directly on that student's screen. When the teacher is busy, the student can raise a virtual hand, or - and this is the part that makes educators lean in - ask a classmate for help anonymously.

Anonymity is a strange feature to be proud of, until you have stood in front of thirty teenagers and watched the ones who most need help refuse to ask for it. The bottleneck in a lot of classrooms is not curiosity. It is embarrassment. Classkick's quiet insight is that if you remove the social cost of asking a question, more questions get asked, which is the entire point of a classroom and somehow the thing classrooms are worst at.

What is clever about Classkick's design is that it did not ask teachers to invent a new pedagogy. It took the routines teachers already run - the warm-up that reviews yesterday, the mid-lesson check for understanding, the exit ticket at the door - and made each faster and more visible. A teacher uses a Classkick assignment to open class, watches the room work it, spots the three kids who did not get it, and helps them without stopping the other twenty-seven.

This is the unglamorous version of "personalized learning," a phrase that usually means an algorithm deciding what a child sees next. Classkick's version keeps the human in the loop and just gives the human better eyes. The platform is available on the web and as a native iPad app, which pairs naturally with a stylus - handwriting math on a screen turns out to matter when the subject is math.

In March 2015, Classkick raised $1.7 million in seed funding - about $1.83 million total across its history - to, in the language of the press releases, "tackle the student achievement gap." The backers were a tidy who's-who of social-impact and Chicago tech money: Kapor Capital, the fund run by Mitch and Freada Kapor; Lightbank; Great Oaks Venture Capital; and Adam Pisoni, the co-founder of Yammer.

The bet those investors made was not on a flashy technology. It was on an old, boring, thoroughly researched idea: that practice plus fast feedback is what actually moves learning, and that the reason schools do not do more of it is logistics, not will. Fix the logistics, and teachers supply the rest. A decade later the company is still shipping, which in edtech - a graveyard of well-funded flameouts - is its own kind of result.

Classkick runs the standard edtech freemium ladder, which works because the person who adopts the product - a single teacher - is rarely the person who pays for it. Individual teachers can use it free, upgrade to Classkick Pro on monthly tiers, and schools and districts buy Pro School or Pro District plans that add unlimited teachers, unlimited student work pages, a dedicated success manager, and professional development. The pitch to an administrator is blunt: a Pro School plan pays for itself once about five teachers are on it, and every teacher after that is free.

It integrates where schools already live - Google Classroom and Google Workspace for rostering, Clever for single sign-on, and the App Store for iPad. The go-to-market is unusual in that it leans on educators themselves: Classkick recruits experienced teachers as community trainers who spread the tool the way it was always meant to spread, teacher to teacher, in the hallway between periods.