[grendelt]

PLEASE have someone with an education background on your team. (Preferably classroom experience.) Don't assume what teachers want and need. Don't just survey teachers. Get them on your team and have them help steer your product development.

[TarpitCarnivore]

I worked in a school's IT department a few years ago and the way the approach to tech worked was downright frustrating. It basically culminated in teachers request XYZ and us providing it. No one, not even our director, took the time to find out what the actual needs were for teachers. All they did was throw money and technology at the teachers and said "here, use it".

I get really uncomfortable when people without any experience inside of a school try to solve problems by just throwing technology at it. There is so much more to a classroom then just having a tablet or chromebook and wifi. The biggest hurdle is always going to be our curriculum set up and how incredibly inflexible it can be in schools; not to mention how many of them are downright jokes when it comes to K-12 tech education.

Edit:

Going to go an extra further here and say no solution for education with tech is valuable unless you can provide a way to make the administration, teachers and parents understand the value in. This means not only making it known why they should try your new startup, but also providing some top notch on-boarding and training. Far too many companies come in and make a product look like gold, but then bail when the time comes to get some continued training on something.

Also understand that a lot of schools have very constrained budgets. It's simply not easy to justifying projects in the XX-XXX thousands range of a budget. So if you're doing this also be sure to figure out some steps on how to work with the school to find ways of justifying the finance, or perhaps grants from the state, to implement this.

Be mindful of state curriculum guidelines as well. Every state has their own guidelines for the different subject areas of education. There are bulleted items that schools must hit to meet them so you need to consider this. You simply cannot come in and say "here's some VR headset to use for history". Work with teachers and administration to have boilerplate lesson plans to meet the criteria of the curriculum. They've been doing things for years and are already busy. The last thing they'll have time for is sitting down to re-write lesson plans to fit a piece of technology in. Some will be eager to do it, but a higher percentage will probably be resistant.

These are all issues and observations I saw when I was getting my education degree and then working in schools for 5+ years. Things have changed a bunch since I left (2011) but I'm sure a lot of these headaches still remain in various ways. There is so much to what makes a classroom work and work well that isn't just in the tool. Teachers, administration and parents have to buy in 100%.

[jansho]

Upvote for you, the teacher/school buy-in is the one factor that decides whether your edtech make or break.

There's a general reluctance to switch to another way of doing things, even if it's proven to be great, unless the cost-benefit is exponentially way better. Then there's another hurdle to overcome - re-training teachers, producing new classroom materials, changing lesson plans etc.

Perhaps it's no accident that the most popular edtech that we hear right now is Clever. (Or maybe that's just because we're on HN, haha)

[randyrand]

If you closely followed this advice, I don't think Kahn academy would have been invented. What teachers want and what students needs are not the same.

[GuiA]

Salman Khan started Khan Academy after extensive hours spent tutoring family members & friends, IIRC. That's not quite classroom experience, but it's also much more than some random fresh out of college grad starting an education startup just because YC said they were interested in them.

[germinalphrase]

Perhaps, but KA is a supplement - not a replacement for - more traditional in-person educational experiences.

[sannee]

KA lecture videos were much more in-depth and much more useful than any high school math lesson I ever received.

I mean, Khan is obviously a top teacher, if he wasn't, he'd get replaced by Johnie Academy or whatever pretty quickly. You can't really staff every high school with top teachers, especially if they earn below average wage (that's the case where I live).

It's also a feature of the whole digital format. The lecture can be bugfixed until there are no mistakes left. And have you ever tried telling your high school teacher to rewind 3 minutes and speak 2x times as quickly?

[randyrand]

Big whoop. KA is still education. This thread is about education startups, not necessarily in-person education startups.

[germinalphrase]

This is the most important comment in the thread. As a teacher, I've been pitched/required to use too many tools that were obvious designed by someone with little to no knowledge of what I actually do on the day-to-day.

It will save you major headaches.

[christudor]

What subject/age-group do you teach? What's been the most useful bit of technology you've used in your job?

[jacquesm]

Lack of domain knowledge is a great way to kill any new company. It's a variation of the 'build it and they will come' mentality, as if you can accurately figure out what to build in the first place without relevant experience.

[akurilin]

At least based on our IK12/YC experience, it was pretty rare to run into EdTech teams with no classroom experience on their founding team.