Given that "Powerful analytics" tells most teachers "You're on the wrong website", I might have skipped that sentence and gone directly to the problem which they actually care about that you purport to solve.
n.b. I love the idea of launching a new Heroku instance for demo accounts... though one questions why Heroku would let you do that. You should probably rethink that interaction design, though. "Setup Demo" suggests a lot of work -- unify the two steps into one and then give it a call-to-action that suggests a low-friction experience. I don't know, "See It In Action" or something. Similarly, virtually anything beats "Create New Account."
As always, please test confident statements I make regarding relative conversion rates. I do, because I flub guesses all the time.
Agree, the copy on the landing page doesn't seem to read "hey teachers, this is for you!", it comes off a bit more of "hey tech guys check out this SAAS app we made for teachers".
Regardless Kite looks absolutely brilliant and likely will be a real game changer for countless teachers. Awesome work
Hey patio11! Funny thing, my co-founder and I were just talking about you and methodologies earlier last week (conversion rates and ab testing you do with BCC etc).
We really hadn't thought about the vocabulary in the buttons there at all, so that's really great advice. Thanks!
I ended up showing the website to my wife (a former K-12 Teacher with a special ed/restraint endorsement in the Commonwealth of Kentucky), who is now working on her Doctorate in Education.
Her initial reaction was, "think of how much this is going to save the schools in budget and in time!", followed by "I wonder how much this is going to cost a district." Locally, the schools here are spending less than 10K/year on software for teachers, and that amount gets cut back a little bit each year: Teachers are frequently purchasing (or pirating) software for use in their classroom when they find software that has educational or productive merit. Your biggest hurdle will probably be getting the price points set correctly...but with that said...the wife loves it and went to show it off to a few of her friends who are still in the public educational system here who claimed it was, 'neat' and even a self-admitted technophobe mentioned that it looked better than the system that they're currently using.
Good job and great work -- this has a lot of potential to be a gamechanger for teachers.
Thanks! I guess it's not immediately apparent, the application itself is free.
Our monetization strategy comes from content (we sell third party content in our store similar to Apple's App Store). This is still in the pipeline, however.
This is one of the most interesting companies I've seen posted on HN in a while. Good luck achieving market penetration.
I'd put up a pdf of a generated assignment that can be scan/fax graded online right away in an easy to access fashion. That is what I most wanted to take a look at, and it looks like the demo won't render the document.
Do you put a QR code on each assignment to uniquely identify a student? So papers have to be handed out precisely to each student? Or do you have students bubble in names/identification numbers?
How are you going to handle the kind of problems that would be created by using this technology in a class of <8th graders? Crumpled/dog eared papers, intentional attempts to make forms hard to computer read. Have you thought about linking to Amazon's Mechanical Turk to have human grading of difficult to parse entries?
Is your product going to be crushed by computers/tablets for every student in future classroom environments? If assignments are all digital (i.e some college textbook environments like 'Mastering Physics') the scan to grade edge slips out. Especially when providers can offer prewritten educational material questions/exams/content as part of their platform.
Every sheet of paper uniquely identifies the student and assignment. One thing we're going to do to make this less annoying is to remember the order the students' assignments were faxed in and just print it backwards the next time the teacher hits print.
Nothing is in place to handle the unfortunate way children choose to transport their homework at the moment; what we do have is that our recognition tech is fairly robust (it handles fax).
Further we've discussed methods of inferring who an unreadable assignment might belong to or having the teacher just step in and view the broken images themselves and do that part by hand.
It's not something we've invested a whole lot of time in figuring out yet, but something we know we will have to think about in the near future.
And in regards to MTurk, yes, we've considered it and romanced the idea of using it for free response type questions.
Our mission is to introduce technology into the classroom. We have computer/tablet based solutions now, but the classroom is currently still in a place where paper and pencil are king. But when they evolve, so will we. :)
You know, I saw when this website was posted earlier.
I think it's awesome you provide both faxing and scanning interfaces.
I had two questions:
1. Where are you based? Why don't you have a snail mail address on your website? It's not even clear you are based in the U.S.
2. On a more stat based note: When you analyze the data, are you merely analyzing the students, or are you providing IRT analysis for the test questions themselves? Do you provide support for A/B testing of test types, or dynamic testing in your online interface?
Because to me, those are things your average teacher can't do, but knowing how well each question and each test assesses students modeled as a function of student ability means that your assessments aren't just easier, but can be made better at measuring ability.
1. Los Angeles, CA. I didn't think snail mail was necessary, but I guess we could throw it on there.
2. We're basically analyzing students. Our content is aligned to the common core standards, so we can figure out what standards students are weak in. These are very, very simple analytics that we're providing right now (that teachers can action upon).
Later on we plan to do more adaptive learning type stuff.
I'm going to read the IRT link, haven't seen that yet.
Push the scantron-less grading. That's your biggest selling point, hands down. A pack of 500 forms (see link below) retails for $60; you'd be saving school districts literally tens of thousands of dollars per year.
What are the privacy implications of a teacher giving students' grade information to a third party? I was under the impression the law (in US) required a parent's release. Is it possible for your admins to view grade data?
You're correct. The teachers can not give student data to a third party without a proper contract for data transfer. However, I will give them credit for having a clear, fair and simple terms of service and privacy policy but it doesn't look like a lawyer was involved with their creation (it wouldn't be so simple or clear if a lawyer wrote it) so they probably haven't sought council for the rest of the business either.
Neat concept and a well designed site, I hope you guys get some market penetration as I'm sure this would be a huge burden relief for teachers everywhere.
A few suggestions:
If I were you I'd make the login button stand out more by having the orange rectangle always visible. Teachers aren't the most tech savvy bunch, and having the login button blend in as much as it does currently will probably confuse/frustrate alot of them.
Also, its probably best to refrain from using the word "Scantron." Its a registered trademark of Scantron Corporation, and as they're technologically WAY behind you guys, their probably going to get pretty trigger-happy with litigation if they see their monopoly threatened.
Just curious: have you actually talked to many teachers? Shown them the site and asked for feedback?
I feel like your landing page is way off from what a teacher would be expecting. Don't get me wrong, _I_ like it, but that doesn't mean it converts well with your target market.
Wow. Two in one week. Just a few days ago I came across: http://www.gradecam.com/ which does something very similar but with document cameras rather than fax machines.
It's great to see tools like these being built for those outside the tech bubble.
Do you plan to offer API support? I would be very interested in having students fax the exam sheet to Kite, and then pulling the question marks (and image?) from your service.
Also, will educators have to use your exam sheets?
Educators build the assignment in our application (writing their own questions or using them from a question bank later on). In order for our product to read the fax, it needs to have been created from our application.
Agree with the previous sentiment-this seems geared towards showcasing a cool tech demo rather than the teachers themselves. Put the scrantron scanning upfront, as that's the main draw and detail the painless process to do it.
i looked at the source code, all seems so very nicely done. can u shed some light on the underlying technology? i see you use some twitter bootstrap, but the ui elements look like your own (i like) and backbone right?
[+] [-] patio11|14 years ago|reply
n.b. I love the idea of launching a new Heroku instance for demo accounts... though one questions why Heroku would let you do that. You should probably rethink that interaction design, though. "Setup Demo" suggests a lot of work -- unify the two steps into one and then give it a call-to-action that suggests a low-friction experience. I don't know, "See It In Action" or something. Similarly, virtually anything beats "Create New Account."
As always, please test confident statements I make regarding relative conversion rates. I do, because I flub guesses all the time.
[+] [-] rwhitman|14 years ago|reply
Regardless Kite looks absolutely brilliant and likely will be a real game changer for countless teachers. Awesome work
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply
We really hadn't thought about the vocabulary in the buttons there at all, so that's really great advice. Thanks!
[+] [-] imroot|14 years ago|reply
Her initial reaction was, "think of how much this is going to save the schools in budget and in time!", followed by "I wonder how much this is going to cost a district." Locally, the schools here are spending less than 10K/year on software for teachers, and that amount gets cut back a little bit each year: Teachers are frequently purchasing (or pirating) software for use in their classroom when they find software that has educational or productive merit. Your biggest hurdle will probably be getting the price points set correctly...but with that said...the wife loves it and went to show it off to a few of her friends who are still in the public educational system here who claimed it was, 'neat' and even a self-admitted technophobe mentioned that it looked better than the system that they're currently using.
Good job and great work -- this has a lot of potential to be a gamechanger for teachers.
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply
Our monetization strategy comes from content (we sell third party content in our store similar to Apple's App Store). This is still in the pipeline, however.
[+] [-] sadfaceunread|14 years ago|reply
I'd put up a pdf of a generated assignment that can be scan/fax graded online right away in an easy to access fashion. That is what I most wanted to take a look at, and it looks like the demo won't render the document.
Do you put a QR code on each assignment to uniquely identify a student? So papers have to be handed out precisely to each student? Or do you have students bubble in names/identification numbers?
How are you going to handle the kind of problems that would be created by using this technology in a class of <8th graders? Crumpled/dog eared papers, intentional attempts to make forms hard to computer read. Have you thought about linking to Amazon's Mechanical Turk to have human grading of difficult to parse entries?
Is your product going to be crushed by computers/tablets for every student in future classroom environments? If assignments are all digital (i.e some college textbook environments like 'Mastering Physics') the scan to grade edge slips out. Especially when providers can offer prewritten educational material questions/exams/content as part of their platform.
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply
Nothing is in place to handle the unfortunate way children choose to transport their homework at the moment; what we do have is that our recognition tech is fairly robust (it handles fax).
Further we've discussed methods of inferring who an unreadable assignment might belong to or having the teacher just step in and view the broken images themselves and do that part by hand.
It's not something we've invested a whole lot of time in figuring out yet, but something we know we will have to think about in the near future.
And in regards to MTurk, yes, we've considered it and romanced the idea of using it for free response type questions.
Our mission is to introduce technology into the classroom. We have computer/tablet based solutions now, but the classroom is currently still in a place where paper and pencil are king. But when they evolve, so will we. :)
[+] [-] lsiebert|14 years ago|reply
I think it's awesome you provide both faxing and scanning interfaces.
I had two questions: 1. Where are you based? Why don't you have a snail mail address on your website? It's not even clear you are based in the U.S.
2. On a more stat based note: When you analyze the data, are you merely analyzing the students, or are you providing IRT analysis for the test questions themselves? Do you provide support for A/B testing of test types, or dynamic testing in your online interface?
Because to me, those are things your average teacher can't do, but knowing how well each question and each test assesses students modeled as a function of student ability means that your assessments aren't just easier, but can be made better at measuring ability.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_response_theory
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply
1. Los Angeles, CA. I didn't think snail mail was necessary, but I guess we could throw it on there.
2. We're basically analyzing students. Our content is aligned to the common core standards, so we can figure out what standards students are weak in. These are very, very simple analytics that we're providing right now (that teachers can action upon).
Later on we plan to do more adaptive learning type stuff.
I'm going to read the IRT link, haven't seen that yet.
Thanks!
[+] [-] joejohnson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] primatology|14 years ago|reply
https://store.scantron.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?sect...
Also, I can't seem to get my PDFs to generate. Anyone else experiencing this?
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greatreorx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnorthrop|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecubed|14 years ago|reply
A few suggestions: If I were you I'd make the login button stand out more by having the orange rectangle always visible. Teachers aren't the most tech savvy bunch, and having the login button blend in as much as it does currently will probably confuse/frustrate alot of them.
Also, its probably best to refrain from using the word "Scantron." Its a registered trademark of Scantron Corporation, and as they're technologically WAY behind you guys, their probably going to get pretty trigger-happy with litigation if they see their monopoly threatened.
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply
Yeah, we don't use the word anywhere on our site, but figured it might be okay to use in the title of an HN post.
[+] [-] tylermenezes|14 years ago|reply
I feel like your landing page is way off from what a teacher would be expecting. Don't get me wrong, _I_ like it, but that doesn't mean it converts well with your target market.
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonah|14 years ago|reply
It's great to see tools like these being built for those outside the tech bubble.
[+] [-] snomad|14 years ago|reply
Do you plan to offer API support? I would be very interested in having students fax the exam sheet to Kite, and then pulling the question marks (and image?) from your service.
Also, will educators have to use your exam sheets?
Can you read barcodes?
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply
Currently no API support, sorry.
[+] [-] aiur|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dz13|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RaphiePS|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajaymehta|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leot|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisdroukas|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodall|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theinternets|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebzlo|14 years ago|reply