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Be prepared for a more comprehensive PTM the next time you go to your child’s school
Lane Merrifield tries his hand at improving the parent-teacher-student relationship and succeeds with a million users using his new application, Freshgrade that creates the student’s online digital portfolio and helps in gaining quick remarks from teachers and parents.
Just when you thought school was boring
As a student, the parent-teacher meeting has been the most dreadful day of school life. As a parent, the meeting has always been about complains and demands for and about the children and as a teacher, the meeting was and still is, about picking up the notorious points first before going to the academics. But it was fun! The relief was as calming as an ice-cream on summer afternoons.
Looking at the tech savvy world of today, parent-student-teacher communication has become monotonous. Following the saying, "Change is necessary", Lane Merrifield brings that change to us.
In 2012, when he realised that the PTM meetings only tell him the summary and not about how his kids’ were doing everyday at school, he created a website and an application called Freshgrade, that creates a child's digital profile and the teachers keep updating about the lessons, work and the remarks on the portfolio.
“There’s no reason we should live in a world where we know more about what my aunt did on her vacation last week, than what my kid did in her class today,” he told EdSurge in an interview.
Which we completely agree to. Freshgrade, a start-up that allows the teachers to assign, assess and share students’ work via digital portfolios, has been appreciated by more than a million students, parents and teachers across 70 countries with majority of its users in the U.S.
"FreshGrade is a free tool that helps teachers plan their lessons, assess their students, document their work, provide personalized instruction, visualize student mastery based on standards and report student work and comprehension to their parents in the form of e-Portfolios. It is fully accessible on a browser and has a companion iPhone app (Quick Capture) that helps teacher’s document student activity in real-time. As of September, 2014, FreshGrade is currently being used over 10,000 students and 2,000 teachers in over 100 schools across the US, Canada and Australia." Read the product description.
“Beyond sharing a video or photo, we focus on capturing the learning that’s taking place,” he explains. Parents can see teachers’ comments in their kids’ individual portfolios. This blend of qualitative and quantitative data, Merrifield believes, is what fuels FreshGrade’s growth.
When asked about the reason why it has not been priced;
“The challenge with trying to monetize parents is that you have those who can afford it, and those who can’t,” remarks Merrifield. “That’s a road that’s unfair to go down."
Image Courtesy: Edsurge.com, YouTube