EdLight Turns One

It’s been one year since I incorporated EdLight. What a year! Here are a few reflections on our first year.

We started EdLight with the mission of making great teaching easier.

One year in, this mission still resonates deeply. With remote / hybrid learning, it’s harder than ever to be a great teacher.

Hey so, remember all those things teachers had to do pre-pandemic? Do all those things. Also provide tech support to 50 users at a time, also provide emotional support to 50 kids going through some real stuff, also care for your own children, also remind every child about every thing they have to do, also… it goes on and on.

Teachers deserve much more in so many ways. With EdLight, we hope we can make at least one small part for the remote / hybrid experience better.

Our initial focus evolved. A lot.

Our first focus was on Exit Tickets (daily formative assessments). However, when we piloted with schools, they were more interested in using our technology to monitor classwork. We shifted our messaging but we still weren’t converting pilots into paid contracts.

That started to change when we added the ability to quickly grab snapshots of student work. We re-focused around trying student work to data.

We launched our product for monitoring classwork in school on March 11. Whomp.

Talk about bad timing. We shut everything down immediately and our users went to zero.

After I got over myself (which, honestly, took a little while), I realized we were actually in a great place: we had a team of developers working well together, basic Ed Tech infrastructure, and no legacy product to support.

Returning to our mission, I spent all my time talking to the best teachers I know, the ones who I knew would be doing amazing work in any circumstance.

The best teachers were going to incredible lengths to get access work that students did on paper. Text messages, emails, shoehorning pictures into any place you could upload a file, WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups, Twitter, you name it, teachers were using it to see student work.

This aligned with our new focus on making student work accessible.

We pivoted to make it easy to see student work and quickly give feedback.

EdLight is now a tool for students share to their work by taking a picture with their Chromebook, tablet or phone, and for teachers to mark up the images and request revisions.

Our new product met a need. We launched in mid-June and signed up 30 paid schools by August.

So many teachers were frustrated with the limited view they have into student thinking with online tools.

I talked to many students as well, and it was honestly heartbreaking to hear about the volume of work that students were sending off without getting anything personalized in return.

There’s something about drawing on student work that says: I see what you did. Add a smiley face and it says: I’m proud of you. It’s an essential piece of the student-teacher relationship that is missing with online tools.

It was not uncommon for a demo to start with “What is EdLight?” and end with “Can you train my teachers in two days?”. We had more demand than we could serve.

The most gratifying part of the first year has been seeing EdLight used. A lot.

So far, our usage has been very high. There are schools running their entire remote learning on EdLight.

We went from 30 images of student work submitted per week in July to 30,000+ per week in September.

In September and October, we were 100% focused on making the experience better for the teachers, schools and students who trusted us to be partners in their learning.

In the first year, I learned what EdlLight is: a way to focus on student work.

Exit tickets, monitoring classwork, seeing work remotely — the common thread for all of this is valuing the work that students do and helping teachers + schools pay attention to it.

You can make test scores better by looking at test scores, but you can’t make authentic work better without looking at authentic work. There’s a huge need for a platform that cuts through sterile data to engage directly with rich student work.

We are now looking ahead to what EdLight could be.

We made it through a crazy first year, but the ride is far from over.

We need to evolve our product to better support hybrid / in person learning, make it accessible to more people, and think more about the second degree implications of better access to student work.

I didn’t do it alone.

I want to give a huge shout out to Lis Roche Bluford, who joined EdLight in June and has been an absolutely essential partner through this wild summer and fall. Thank you, Lis!