So I was thinking it’s almost exactly thirty years ago today that Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education created a national committee on excellence in education to assess the quality of education in America at the time. Two years later, about two years later, the committee came out with this report and they called it “A Nation at Risk”, and the chairman concluded that, if an unfriendly power had imposed on America, the level of education mediocrity that exists today, we might have viewed that as an act of war.

So, one thing that’s pretty much agreed upon within the education space today is that the situation today that that statement is as true today as it was 30 years ago. The, you’ve all seen the statistics. Our children are falling behind, compared to other nations, in math, in science and even in reading.

If you look at the recent drop out in our schools or even when kids complete, the, uh, the schools, they’re hopefully unprepared to contribute to the world today. In the intervening 30 years since that date, amazing things had happened. We’ve created the world wide web, extraordinary technologies have been developed, and we as a country have failed to in any way deal with the risks pointed out 30 years ago.

In fact, we failed so many children, too many children. My co-founders Allen Louie, Tim Brady, and I at Imagine K12 don’t believe we have another 30 years to waste. We also believe that the application of technology and Silicon Valley innovation to the problem of education has to be part of the solution.

So it’s with a lot of real pride and hope we present you these 10 companies, the first graduating class from Imagine K12, all of whom are working to improve education in America to improve the lives of teachers and parents and above all, to improve the outcomes for our children. Hi, I’m Daniel, and I built Goalbook.

Goalbook is making it possible for the very first time in education to allow every student to have their own personal learning plan. Before coming to Imagine K12, I was a special education teacher and a district administrator. I saw the powerful impact it could have on a student’s life when a group of caring adults personalized the education for that student and really knew them as an individual.

And this has been a trend in education. Education is no longer an individual effort. is a team sport, a team of specialists collaborating to try to meet a variety of different students needs and learning styles but there’s a problem. The problem is that there’s no efficient way for these teams of educators to collaborate around individual students.

Right now, their only solutions are having a face-to-face meeting around a conference table, or passing around packets of information with student data. If you’ve been to a parent conference, parent-teacher conference recently, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Goalbook changes that. This is Goalbook, it’s different.

It’s a private social network centered around individual students. Now students are no longer packets of papers or a row in the teacher’s gradebook. They have a living profile that is updated continuously with their personal information and progress. This is Brandon, a student in Goalbook. This is his personal learning team, the group of educators And his parents, who are working together to help him achieve his personal learning goals.

This is the activity stream for Brandon’s profile, where different members of team can update each other synchronously without having to have a face to face meeting. And all those packets of papers are gone. Because this is a personal learning goal for Brandon in Goalbook that his team has developed with him together.

They can come together, update progress, with the latest information about how Brandon is achieving his personal goals. We’re on our way to build the largest repository of personalized learning goals in education and building a recommendation engine to drive these goals and connect them to the products, services, and curriculum that are gonna help Brandon and his teams be successful.

We’ve launched, with 7 institutional customers in the Bay area, ranging from large public schools to small private schools. All were innovative who want to personalize education for their students. Also, we’re excited by th
e fact that managing personalized learning plans and personalized services is a huge opportunity, in many other large markets, beyond education, and we think Goalbook can go here next.

I’m Daniel, I built Goalbook, and we’re personalizing education for all students. Thank you.

Hello my name’s Jason Lang. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Formative Learning. Research shows that teacher quality is the single greatest driver for student achievement in the classroom, yet developing great teachers is actually really hard, cause there’s no formula for it. Every teacher’s different and therefore every teacher needs individualized support.

But the system we’ve used to develop teachers is fundamentally broken. It’s a one size fits all seminar-based model that rarely leads to teacher improvement. Yet because it’s a system that’s credit hour driven, thirteen billion dollars is spent annually in this manner. but the problem isn’t that the content’s bad, it’s rather the tools that administrators use to determine which teachers shouldshould get which training, is actually broken.

You see, the current process is a paper-based one, and what you see here is actually a magnetic whiteboard application that’s meant to provide, and put this entire process, and support this entire process, for one school. But the promise, there’s actually huge promise is for a really effective teacher developer, development and support system.

All you have to do to see this is look at the five billion dollars the race to the top wouldn’t play to support this process. And it really fundamentally outlines the main drivers that this system needs to look like. Number one, we need to provide teachers with high-quality feedback on their actual practice, and we need to track data on their effectiveness and actually see monitor their improvement overtime, and number 2 we needed to confirm, number 2, we need to use that data, not against teachers in a punitive way, but rather in support of teachers, to provide individualized recommendations to help them improve.

And that’s what we do at informative learning. We worked with some of the absolute thought leaders in the market to build an observation system that allows that takes this entire mandated, paper-based process and puts it online, and we make it as easy as a checklist, and then we use that data and we actually make the entire process free, which means we don’t actually have to sell to schools, and we can avoid the long sales cycle associated with that.

We then take that data and use it to inform an Amazon-like marketplace, where we can provide hosting abilities for content providers and provide a distribution channel for content providers which we can then monetize, by providing individualized recommendations for teachers, as to what support and what training would help the most.

We’ve been really fortunate, and I’m really honored to have worked with so amazing customers in the process of developing what we could what we have, and our customers are actually so excited and passionate about what we’re doing that they’ve already committed, or they’ve committed, more than three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in contracts even before we launch with a single user.

And I’m excited that we’re gonna be able to drive that to north of $750,000 by the the time we launch next year. Thank you very much. My name’s Jason Lang. We’re Formative Learning. Hi. My name is Brett Kauff, and I co-founded a company called Remind 101. with my brother David. A good way to think of us is Twitter for teachers, but the difference is, we’re private and safe.

Teachers don’t have have a good way to communicate with their students and parents after school. Let me explain why. They can’t use Twitter, because Twitter’s not safe. The whole world can’t know what’s going on in their classroom. The state of Missouri just banned the use of social media between teachers and students.

So you’re probably wondering here, okay Brett, what’s the big deal? Why can’t the teacher just email the student? Well, cause an email is ineffective; it has a 22 percent open rate and we all know that kids don’t check email. A text message, however, has a 98 percent open rate. It’s the signal that gets through the noise.

So this is great. We’ve covered that text messaging is effective, it’s quick, and students love it, right? But there’s a problem. It is a bad idea for a teacher to use their personal cell phone to communicate with a student. What a teacher really wants is a product that’s private, effective, and safe, where they don’t have to share their personal phone number.

And that’s precisely what we’ve built at Remind 101. Let me show you. This is Remind 101. On the top-left of the screen you’ll see that teachers can easily manage their classes, and on the bottom-left, they can see any students, or parents subscribed. And notice, that we don’t list any phone numbers.

This is a big deal to teachers. We made it ridiculously simple for a teacher to send a message. All they have to do is type in their message, hit the send button, and it instantly delivers to any students, or parents subscribing. via text message, it’s that simple. Teachers love this product, and it shows, because we are growing fast.

Since launching three weeks ago, we’ve had over 1500 teachers, more than 15,000 students and parents, and I’m really excited to say that we have sent over 100,000 messages. Thank you, thank you! Actually, it’s a 130,000 as two days ago, I couldn’t update the slide. We’re going to remove this wall.

When a teacher, a student and a parent communicate after school, it will be over their Remind 101 platform. Thank you so much. I’m Chris. I’m a co-founder of Tutor Cloud and we are disrupting the eight billion dollar private tutoring industry. When Brent and I were students at Stanford we started tutoring agency to connect our class classmates with students in the area.

And we saw two interested things, students really liked working with college tutors because they were more relatable and our classmates would rather tutor than work at the bookstore for nine dollars an hour. So we looked around, and we saw an army of bright, capable tutors, not just at Stanford, but at colleges across the country.

And we thought, if we could take this resource that is currently inaccessible and make it widely available by putting it online we could reinvent tutoring. So far, no one has gotten the experience for online tutoring right. For online tutoring to take off, there needs to be a company with the same insane focus on customer experience that allowed Amazon to change the market for books, or Zappos to change the market for shoes.

Let’s take a look at the Tutor Cloud experience. Tammy is looking for a chemistry tutor for her son. She goes to Tutor Cloud, searches for chemistry, and Owen here is the top result. Now it’s no mistake that Owen’s at the the top, he’s a chemical engineering major at Stanford, and he has twelve reviews from parents, saying he’s a great chemistry tutor.

So he knows his stuff. But tutoring is 60% more effective When students have something in common with their tutor. So we’re building personality profiles for all of our tutors using data we collect from the Facebook Connect API. So that means that very soon we’ll be able to find you not just a great Chemistry tutor but a great Chemistry tutor that shares your interest in Xbox or soccer or dance.

Now, once we’ve found you that perfect tutor, we make it really easy to connect. Just send on a message, and our software goes to work and tracks them down. Gets him on the phone with you within 15 minutes. All the communication happens through our system so nobody has to exchange the personal contact information.

And we can track how long it takes tutors to respond, and adjust their search ranking accordingly. One of the coolest things about TutorCloud is that students can meet for as long as they want, whether that be for an hour or for 15 minutes. We’re TutorCloud and we are reinventing tutoring. Thank you!

Hi. My name is Api, and I’m the founder of Brain Nook. Brain Nook is an educational game that’s changing the way kids spend their time online. This is Meg. Meg is eight years old, and, like the typical child in the US, Meg spends over an hour every day playing games across platforms like PCs, tablets, and mobile devices.

Now, this worries her mom and her teacher because they see that she isn’t really learning anything from these games. In fact 59 percent of US parents think that games don’t teach kids critical thinking skills. At Brain Nook, we think this is a huge problem and it’s something we want to fix. Brain Nook is a new kind of learning game kids, parents, and teachers together.

In Brain Nook, Meg gets a great game experience just like in all of the online games that she plays. But she’s learning at the same time. And her mom and her teacher get the kinds of tools they need to understand and to improve her performance. In Brain Nook, Meg can explore dozens of colorful virtual worlds, she can interact safely with her friends, and we make sure that these interactions online are safe.

And she can complete missions, win badges, customize her character, level up, play games in real time against kids from around the world. All of these great activities that kids know and love from all of the games that they play. And in addition to all of that, we’ve added in over a hundred standards aligned math and language games that help make the reinforce the concepts that she’s learning in school.

These are things like addition, visualization, spelling, word building. All of these
great topics that are absolutely essential for any elementary school child. And because all of the content in Brain Nook is standard and aligned, we can give Meg’s mom and her teacher just the tools they need to understand how she’s doing.

So her mom can see progress reports and her teacher can give her assignments right through BrainNook, that keep her engaged at home with what she’s been doing in the classroom. Now kids games are both very engaging and very profitable. Moshi monster this year will generate over a hundred million dollars in gross sales revenue and in Pop Tropica which has one hundred and seventy million users.

The average child spends almost half an hour each time they come to the site. An amazing level of engagement. Of course, these are all fun games, so, can we really make an educational game that’s this much fun? Well, the good news is, that in Brain Nook we’ve done just that because in Brain Nook the average child spends twenty-eight minutes each time they come to the site compared to twenty-nine minutes for Pop Shop and it’s thirteen minutes for Moshi Monsters.

So, with Brain Nook we have an educational game that kids love playing just as much as the leading non-educational kids games. Brain Nook is the new generation of learning games for young kids. My name is Api, and you can check us out on the web at BrainNook.com. Hi, I’m Stuart Frye, CEO and co-founder of Eduvant.

At Eduvant we’re transforming the way schools use data.

You see, schools are squandering one of the most valuable resources they have, data they already collect. There is a reason for that.

School data systems were designed mainly for compliance, or administrative functions. So we ended up with student, employee, financial, outcome measures sitting in unlinked silos, just for databases. To link those up, and to derive decision making value from those systems schools had two options.

The first was to hire a bunch of statisticians and build a research department. the second was to build a multi-million dollar data warehouse. These solutions have their strengths but they have three really important problems. The first is they are outdated. It could be 1980 or 1990, and I could be talking to you about research departments and data warehouses.

And the usability and effectiveness of these solutions reflects that twenty year time lag. The second is access. The people that need this data to make decisions every day, principals, teachers, counselors, simply don’
t have timely access to it. And the third is an economics problem, a vast majority of Irish nations, 16,000 school districts simply don’t have the dollars or the shooting capital to pull either one of these off.

So they’re not doing anything anything with that data. That’s why Edge Avant has developed a third solution. We have a lightweight, open development platform. It sits in the cloud and extracts the twenty percent of data that drives eighty percent of the analytical value for school leaders and educators.

Now that platform a countless number of Apps. At edge Avant, we have a core sweep we’ve developed. But because our platform is open, any developer can build integrated data solution for schools. Now to give you a better sense for the Apps that we’re developing I want to show you our principal dashboard.

This is a tool we developed because research shows principals on average have two minutes a day for data use. So, we put operational, student, and intelligence, all in one screen. With communicative data visualizations that help them make the most of that two minutes. But our platform is not just about chopping up information you already have.

It allows you to create new Apps with new analytics that integrates seamlessly within information, you’re already collecting. Like this tool we built for counselors. They can create new referrals, integrate with their list of student names, auto populate with important demographic information. It has their schedule, their teachers.

It makes it insanely easy to create a new referral, and because behavior is such a important tracking tool we have a reporting interface that let’s them see trends in their school across schools and across districts. People want what we’re building. We’ve got pilots in two districts, with reach to thousand students and the educators that teach them.

Just since we’ve launched we’ve got a 130k in revenue and we’ve got the right team to pull this off. Twelve years start-up experience with our co-founders. Remember, we’re Edge Avant. Schools deserve accessible, innovative tools for their data. Hi, I’m Eric Simons and I am the founder of Class Connect.

When I was in high school, which was about a year ago, I wasn’t the most engaged, organized student. My teachers tried really hard keep me interested in their classes and help me stay organized. But with budget cuts class sizes are getting bigger and bigger, which means that this problem is just getting worse.

And I was just one of many students that needed their assistance. So the problem is that teachers simply don
‘t have enough time to teach and engage their students as well as manage and organize their classroom. Because teachers are expected to do a lot. And the tech savvy teachers have turned to technology to help them be more productive and they use a ton of different services to do this.

Now, although these teachers can put this together and make it work, it’s actually very painful to do this. Because none of these services were built to work together. For example, if I add an assignment into my class calendar saying my students have to complete a quiz, I can’t actually directly link to the quiz on KIA.

And actually to better illustrate this, this is what the desktop looks like of a productive tech savvy teacher. Or maybe counter productive. So although the tech savvy teachers are able to figure this out and make these services work together, most teachers just give up. and so I thought there has to be a better way where teachers can complete everything that they need to do in one simple package that’s so easy to use that any teacher can use it.

And at ClassConnect that’s what we do; we build tools that make teachers more productive. And we started by streamlining classroom management. On ClassConnect teachers can take all their course content and put it into one place whether it be files, videos, Google docs, websites and more. And they can share this with their classes with just a click, and our grey book attendance and calendar system are seamlessly integrated with our other tools.

So if I put an assignment into my calendar I can actually directly link to any of the files that are associated with it, right. These are seamlessly connected, but we didn’t stop with streamlining classroom management because we feel that there’s a lot of potential to enhance the way that teachers spend instructional time.

And so we looked at the way that teachers give lectures and we realized they are very boring. They’re just PowerPoints and bullet points on a slide and the teachers talking. So we thought, let’s make it really easy to create engaging lectures that will actually captivate students. And that’s what we did.

We created a brand new presentation tool. And with it you can put interactive content directly into your slides. And while a teacher moves to the lecture the students follow along in real time they can actually explore the content that their teacher’s talking about. This is adding an entire new dimension into the way that we teach and the way that we learn, and we’re not the only ones who think that.

In the past months, we’re now powering over thousand classrooms on Class Connect and the feedback we’ve received has just been remarkable. These teachers don’t just want to use Class Connect, they need to use Class Connect to do their jobs effectively. And this quote from one of the teachers that uses Class Connect, summarizes our company better than anything I’ve ever seen.

Because this is Class Connect and this is what we do. Thank you! Hi I’m Wade Roberts, CEO and co-founder of Educ Creations. You know every so often a product is introduced that makes it really simple for all of us to create and share online in an entirely new way. And every now and then when this happens the companies that create these products, become tremendously valuable.

Because when it’s really easy for all of us to create and share online. The online crowd creates an unbelievable amount of great content, and entire industries are changed forever. We think teaching and learning are next, and we’ve created the software platform that’s going to make this happen. Websites like Khan Academy have shown us all the incredible potential of using short video tutorials to engage students and let them all learn at their own pace.

And we talked to a lot of teachers who would love to provide their own students with any kind of access to their own lessons on the web. But the truth is, today this is too complicated and time consuming. You’ve got to use a lot of different applications and it would take most teachers and hour just to create just a 5 minute lesson doing it this way.

We’ve solved this problem, we think creating a great 5 minute lesson should take you 5 minutes and it should be as simple as visiting a website are picking up an iPad, pressing a record button and then you just start to teach, this is what we’ve built at Edu Creations. Everything a teacher needs to create and share a great lesson on the web is right here in a single application.

She’s got a great image or a power point she’d like to use, she can really easily pull that in and she can draw on top of everything as she explains her main point. Everything she says, everything she writes, every interaction she has on the program is recorded. And it is automatically posted in educreations.com, which has been a to where all of our teachers, all of our students can watch it at any time.

Now it’s really important to us that anybody can do this, so we have created a web app that runs in any web browser. As well as an Ipad app . And on top of that, our software is fully compatible with all of the interactive white boards that are already installed in over 30% of U.S. classrooms. We’ve designed this enclosed collaboration with teachers.

It’s really important to us that we solve a problem that they really have, and the teachers that have used this love it. In fact, four teachers from Los Altos were the first teachers last year in the country, to pilot Khan Academy in their classrooms. This year all four of those teachers are using Educreations in their classrooms, cause they and their students want to create their own videos.

And we’ve got the right team to pull this off. Chris and I have a deep background in building user generated content applications at massive scale. I recently created a Facebook application called Pieces of Flair. This grew to over 20 million users who created over 15 million items of content. Rocky acquired this company in 2008.

And Rocky on that Chris who’s a rock star engineer. He was an essential member of the back end team, and scaled Rocky’s databases to over a hundred million users across all their social properties. Today we’re working really hard to make it simple for anybody to teach what they know, and learn what they don’t, anytime, anyplace, on any device.

Come check us out at Educreations.com. Thanks! Good morning. We at Eleven Learning believe that the textbook industry is fundamentally broken. And it’s not time to fix it, it is time to blow it up. Between K to twelve and higher ed, this is a thirteen billion dollar business, and the reason it’s so big is because textbooks are breathtakingly expensive.

and their also breathtakingly inadequate. Today’s textbooks are not what the students want to read, they’re not what schools want to buy and they’re not even what authors want to write. And all these problems stem from the way that textbooks are made. The big publishers have a slow, expensive system that can only produce giant, expensive books.

They spend three years and over a million dollars on each title that they publish. And that’s where we come in. We have built a platform that makes textbook publishing scalable. Start to finish it takes us six months and our fixed cost earned her five thousand dollars per title. Essentially every book is like a lean start up.

The heart of our platform is our crowdsourced editing system. Let’s take a look at the recent activity for one of our computer science books. We have 15 professors who are reading through the entire book. They’re investing dozens of hours and making hundreds of improvements and they’re doing this because they want this textbook in their classroom.

Essentially we have taken the academic peer view process, we made it social, and then we applied it to textbooks. So it’s familiar to academics and it’s far more effective than what the legacy publishers do. Authors are flocking to us, because they know that we are not going to make them write some giant milquetoast textbook.

They control what goes in their book. Authors are lining up and we are filling huge pent up demand. This chart shows what we’ve done just this summer with one guy spreading the word about us. Each one of these books is worth between 40 and $100,000 in revenue. The books that we’ve signed so far are worth over a half million dollars.

And we are not forgetting about the students either. using our online rating app, they can read socially and share their notes with classmates. And our content is interactive and designed to take advantage of the web. We’re offering both print and online editions. The print book is 75% less expensive than traditional text books.

Soon we’re going to introduce our “freemium” online edition but we will always have a fully free version. The team that we have assembled knows how to grow this business. Dev and I lost a social network with over 3 million monthly uniques and Steven spent 15 years with Legacy Publishers before he came over from the dark side.

Textbooks are a huge industry. It is being disrupted right now and we are th ecompany that’s doing it. Thank you. Hi everyone. I’m Sam the co-founder of Class Dojo. We’re making software that fixes bad behavior in class. and we’re using real time feedback to do it. In the 4 weeks since we’ve launched, we’re being used in 3 1/2 thousand classrooms with more then 70,000 students.

I’m gonna talk more about this but I’m gonna start with the problem. Behavior management. Behavior management is one of the most difficult things that new teachers do. I was a former teacher and something that I struggled with and I am not a learner. It turns out there’s very few tools that help teachers do this well, every teacher has at their own way, but the really terrifying thing is that this problem wastes up to 50% of class time so they show this.

That’s half a school year gone with no teaching, and no learning taking place. We need a solution to this problem. And the Class Dojo is that solution. It’s the first scalable behavior management tool that actually improves behavior in real time. Let me show you how it works, teachers can customize the behaviors they want to reward.

So for example participation or teamwork or creativity and then in class, this is what gets displayed on a whiteboard or a projector. And a teacher can award a student for a specific behavior or accomplishment using just one click of a smart phone or a laptop, so that Allen knows he’s one step closer to his participation badge, or Jeff knows that disruption isn’t always a good thing, as you’ll see.

Feedback, real-time feedback, actually improves behavior over time. And the basic game dynamics we’ve built in, make this engaging for the students as well. But the really cool thing about ClassDojo is that while the teacher is using it to teach, it’s generating, it’s analyzing all the data that the teacher is generating, so it automatically produces reports and analytics for each student without any additional data entry needed by the teacher.

And these reports are already being shared the parents at home. So for the first time we are getting real time data out of the classroom on something that was really difficult to measure, and we’re making teachers lives easier by doing it. And teachers love this.

In the four weeks since we’ve launched, we’re being used in three and a half thousand classrooms, with more than 70,000 students. And I’m proud to say that as of this morning, two Class Dojo points are being awarded every second.

It turns out there’s a huge market for this, because behavior isn’t just a problem at school, It’s a problem at home as well, and that’s where Class Dojo’s going next.

So, that’s Class Dojo in three minutes.

Remember we’re fixing bad behavior in class, one of the biggest barriers to learning. We’re seeing incredible traction, and we’re going off to a huge market.

Come and check us out, Classdojo.com.

Thank you.

Good . Well, listen, thanks so much again to Jeff and the K-12 team for giving us their demos this morning. Terrific initiative.

For the first time all week we are actual
ly running a few minutes ahead of schedule, so we’re actually gonna take a five minute break, don’t go too far.