Like many industries, the world of education is a quagmire of technical and productivity issues. Nationwide budget cuts and falling test scores have caused the industry as a whole to rethink the approach to teaching, learning, testing, and communicating.
A team of New Orleans Teach For America educators noticed a big problem with communication during their tenure in the classroom. Co-founder Grace Landrieu told us, “[We] created an iPhone app, Dash4Teachers, to solve one of our common pain points — inefficient parent communication systems.”
Most #edtech these days is focused on managing the classroom but ‘the classroom’ is a big thing to manage with one piece of technology. The team behind Dash Technologies took a different approach by trying to solve one manageable problem that could have a big impact.
“It takes a teacher over 15 minutes to complete the parent contact process just one time for one student, yet student test scores increase 40% faster with high levels of parent engagement,” said Grace.
The Dash4Teachers app, available in the iTunes App Store today, allows teachers to quickly and easily make notes about student performance, generates a daily speed dial of parent numbers, and includes a call log with history data for every conversation.
Dash has already been tested on real teachers. One early user, Lauren Knight, said “I’ve been using Dash all [Teach For America] institute and it’s so cool to see the clear difference between my experience calling parents and my [co-teacher’s] experience without Dash.”
Outside of the classroom, Dash has already experienced success in the ed tech start-up world. The team placed second at StartupWeekendEDU in New York and fourth at the NOEW Big Idea Competition.
Check out the Dash4Teachers app in the App Store, follow @techbydash on twitter for the latest updates, and keep an eye on this team of teachers taking the world of education by storm!