

Show HN: We allow teachers to print out "Scantrons" and scan for results via fax - ebzlo
http://kiteedu.com/#

======
patio11
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.

~~~
rwhitman
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

~~~
ebzlo
Thanks! Yeah. Going to rework that. Lots of great feedback here.

------
imroot
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.

~~~
ebzlo
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.

------
sadfaceunread
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.

~~~
ebzlo
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. :)

------
lsiebert
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.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_response_theory>

~~~
ebzlo
Hello!

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!

~~~
snowwrestler
A physical address and contact info on your site shows that you are a real
company and above-board (i.e. not a scam operation).

------
primatology
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.

[https://store.scantron.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?sect...](https://store.scantron.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?section=10700&item=42622&sitex=10022:22372:US)

Also, I can't seem to get my PDFs to generate. Anyone else experiencing this?

~~~
ebzlo
Checking. Edit: DNS hasn't resolved for our print server. We're going to
hotfix it real quick.

~~~
primatology
That's what I call support. Awesome!

EDIT: Looks to be working!

~~~
ebzlo
PDFs should be generating now. Thanks! :)

------
greatreorx
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?

~~~
jnorthrop
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.

~~~
eli
This is an aside, but many lawyers view it as their job to protect your
company from legal liability to maximum extent possible. But any half-way
decent lawyer should be willing to take directions like "limit the privacy
policy to the page" and "cut out extraneous legalese."

------
ecubed
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.

~~~
ebzlo
Thanks!

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
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.

~~~
ebzlo
Yeah, we're getting a lot of that from HNers, we're working on a new layout
and will talk to some teachers before we push it up. Thanks!

~~~
tylermenezes
They should probably be a lot more involved than "talk to some teachers before
we push it up".

------
jonah
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._

------
snomad
This is exciting!

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
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.

Currently no API support, sorry.

~~~
snomad
Could educators import the question bank? If so, would it work with Moodle's
XML format (<http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Moodle_XML_format>)

~~~
ebzlo
That looks like an excellent next feature for us to build. :)

------
aiur
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.

------
dz13
Would students in the class be able to login and see their grades? It would be
awesome to integrate this with LMS platforms like Blackboard.

------
RaphiePS
Really curious as to how you're implementing the fax feature. Is it an in-
house solution, or are you guys using somebody's API?

~~~
ebzlo
In house solution--well, bundling together a couple of different open source
libs (QR code detection, openCV).

~~~
ewang1
what about the fax communications api? or are you guys interfacing with
physical copper lines via some kind of fax server?

------
ajaymehta
The UI on your home page is terrific! So well designed... did you do that in-
house or contract it out?

~~~
ebzlo
In house! By me, so thanks! :)

------
leot
Most modern copiers offer scan-and-email functionality. This might be much
simpler than faxing.

~~~
ebzlo
You are correct! And they can be faxed to us as well. We just don't publicize
it (yet).

------
chrisdroukas
This is a beautifully designed site. I absolutely love the sliding signup/sign
in sheets.

~~~
ebzlo
Thanks!

~~~
chaz
I would suggest changing the behavior of pushing the entire page down to one
where just the username and password boxes descend from the top and situate
themselves next to a stationary Login button. I don't like when the page moves
from underneath my cursor, which happens with homepage takeover ads.

Have you gotten any feedback about the domain name? kite-e-d-u-dot-com could
be confused as kite.edu.com

------
woodall
Instead of faxing have you guys thought about OCR via a webcam/mobile
phone/scanner?

------
theinternets
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?

~~~
ebzlo
Yup! RoR, Backbone, heavily modified bootstrap(v1), Haskell for the scan/print
feature.

