[joshlingaround]

As a former middle school teacher, I found that the evidence-based techniques that the author mentioned, such as "spacing" and "retrieval", were underutilized in classrooms due to teachers not knowing about them, as well as how tedious it can be to implement them. I founded a nonprofit called Podsie (https://www.podsie.org) to help with this problem, and we created a free tool that's essentially like "Anki for classrooms" so that teachers can help their students study more effectively in their classes.

[lintaho]

this is really cool, especially as a nonprofit - makes it feel much more mission-oriented and teacher-first.

are there any ideological/learning methodology differences between podsie and anki?

[joshlingaround]

Thanks, and good question!

Ideologically, I think Anki and Podsie are pretty aligned in our beliefs that personalized spaced retrieval (often referred to as spaced repetition) is a much more efficient and effective way to learn and retain information compared to other traditional review practices (eg. reading textbooks or going over notes).

Learning-wise, perhaps the key difference is that while Anki is very focused on the individual-learner, we're much more focused on empowering each teacher. This means that we've needed to build features like having different autogradable question types (eg. short answer and multiple choice), ensuring that teachers have easy-to-follow data reports on how students and classes are doing, and also providing teachers with tools to incentivize their students to regularly review on Podsie.