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When I was in school – which, judging by how my spine feels most mornings, was fourteen thousand years ago – keeping track of how you were doing on your homework felt, itself, like homework. Parents, meanwhile, were generally in the dark about your overall progress until report cards came at the end of the quarter. If something happened that caused a student (or many students!) To start slipping academically, it was often on the already incredibly busy teachers to dig through their gradebook and identify that dip themselves. Much of that, it seems, holds true today.
Schoolytics is a startup that is looking to change that. Pitched as an “all-in-one information hub” for students, parents, teachers and admins, Schoolytics is an analytics dashboard (School + Analytics = Schoolytics, yeah?) That keeps everyone aligned on how students are doing day to day, flags notable changes and provides an overview of trends.
Schoolytic’s dashboard comes in four flavors, each with a wider view than the last:
- The student dashboard, which lets an individual student track their own grades, upcoming assignments, what they’ve missed and metrics, like how often they’re turning stuff in on time.
- The parent dashboard, which lets a parent / guardian see those metrics for each of the kids in their house.
- The teacher dashboard, which lets you look at metrics for individual students or view things like assignment completion rates class-wide. It can also help flag when a student suddenly starts missing assignments, or automatically generate things like honor roll (based on assignment completion rates) or progress reports.
- The administrator dashboard, which lets you view metrics by school, grade, or dive into the reports for individual classes.
Schoolytics was founded by Aaron Wertman and Courtney Monk, both of whom previously worked on data science at the textbook rental / online tutoring / education mega-co Chegg. Monk also spent over half a decade working with Teach For America, and is a school board member in her local school district. While volunteering with KIPP schools in the Bay Area, Wertman found that many of the tools schools were relying on were barebones, and the data raw. He started tinkering with ways to modernize it all in early 2020 – by the end of the year, the two formalized their efforts and launched Schoolytics.
Schoolytics gleans most of its data from a learning management system that many teachers are already using: Google Classroom. Classroom saw a tremendous spike in usage during the pandemic, as many teachers had to quickly take their classrooms and virtual assignments. But while Google Classroom helps to collect basic data on what students have turned in, it’s on the teachers to figure out how to chart or analyze it. Schoolytics gives that data a frontend, and takes the manual heavy lifting and spreadsheet-wrangling off the teacher’s to-do list.
Schoolytics’ Teacher View showing class-wide trends. Image Credits: Schoolytics
The company is also working on a built-in messaging system to give teachers a dedicated and safe place to communicate with students or broadcast messages to an entire class.
Ideally, Schoolytics is paid for by the district. If a teacher wants to experiment with the tool for themselves, Schoolytics is currently offering two plans: a free option for teachers with up to 10 Google Classrooms, and paid option starting at $ 10 per month for teachers that need up to 100 Classrooms.
This week the company is announcing that it raised $ 2.8 million in a seed round backed by Haystack, Audacious Ventures and Accelerated Ventures. The team is currently made up of around 10 people, and they’re currently working with more than 500 schools, from K-12 all the way through universities.
Want to poke around the dashboard yourself? Schoolytics has a demo dashboard here, which allows you to check out what it’s like as any of the different aforementioned roles.
Schoolytics Parent View showing details for each kid. Image Credits: Schoolytics
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