In short: we won!
I took part in the first Education Startup Weekend this past weekend, a great event where you try to create a viable startup over the course of 54 hours. You can read the NPR story here or a great writeup from one of my teammates here. My team created DemoLesson.com, a career listing site for teachers where every teacher has a teaching video, so that school administrators doing the hiring can get real information much earlier in the process. You can see a splash page here. The concept is pretty straightforward, but there’s a real need to be able to see teachers teach before flying them out for an in-person interview and demo lesson. I liken it to coding interviews for developers: you want to be able to see the person doing what it is you’re actually hiring them for. There was a lot of positive feedback from Teach For America, the charter school administrators we talked to, and the teachers we interviewed. The weekend was also a competition, and out of 14 competing teams, the judges thought ours was the most viable. It was a great team, a great experience, and a lot of fun.
Tags: Projects