

Announcing the Innovate NYC Schools App Challenge - 2arrs2ells
http://blog.getclever.com/2013/01/announcing-the-innovate-nyc-schools-app-challenge/

======
2arrs2ells
Clever founder here.

It's currently way too hard for startups to break into the education market.
Our platform takes care of some of the technical challenges (developers no
longer need to build interfaces to myriad legacy systems), but getting your
product into the hands of teachers & students is still tough.

That's why we're incredibly excited to support New York City on this app
challenge. With Clever making it easier to write an app, and New York
promising to evaluate your app, it's never been easier to get initial traction
in schools with your education app.

~~~
jayunit
Developer interested in edtech here. This looks fantastic! I'm in the Bay
Area, and planning to attend the SLC Camp this weekend [1] [2]. A coupla
questions:

* As someone who's been a student and taught informally before, I have some understanding of what's involved in building a small educational app focused on learning. But having never been a professional teacher, I find another area that some of this technology tackles to be unfamiliar territory: planning lessons and fostering personalized learning [3] [4]. It seems like this area is a big promise of interchange efforts like SLC and companies like Clever, but I find the problem space a little difficult to grasp as an outsider.

I think part of it is that the SLC's work necessarily involves large up-front
planning that covers many domains in detail ("here's a great big interchange
spec - _now_ go write real code."), which is at odds with my experience with
consumer internet startups of keeping a tight focus and staying concrete.

I'm hoping the SLC Camp this weekend helps this by bringing developers and
teachers together, and giving developers like me more context and a more
concrete understanding of problems. I'm curious, is there any plan for such a
matchmaking or collaboration event in NYC that interested devs should look out
for?

* How does Clever relate to SLC? It seems similar to the aim of SLC/SLI (smooth, unified data interchange), but I see that Clever is an SLC partner [5]. How does Clever relate to SLC/SLI? I admit that the SLC/SLI documentation feels a little obtuse to an outsider - I found myself asking "...what exactly does this _do_?" several times while reading up on it. I much more readily grasp the Clever docs.

* Unrelated to the article: Are folks from Clever going to SLC Camp this weekend?

1 - Shared Learning Collaborative <http://slcedu.org>

2 - SLC Camp Bay Area <http://slccampbayarea-community.eventbrite.com>

3 - SLC context vignette: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERWEjWNskuE>

4 - SLC context vignette: <http://slcedu.org/blog/introducing-mr-thompson>

5 - <http://slcedu.org/marketplace/slc-partners>

~~~
2arrs2ells
Great questions!

* How does a dev (who hasn't been in education) know what to build?

NYC has put together some great initial resources to help orient developers
without educational backgrounds on what they're looking for:
[http://nycschools.challengepost.com/details/needs_opportunit...](http://nycschools.challengepost.com/details/needs_opportunities)
<http://nycschools.challengepost.com/details/resources>

I'm not aware of any specific events for this challenge to connect teachers &
developers, but EdTech meetups (<http://www.meetup.com/NYEdTech/>
<http://www.meetup.com/sfedtech/> <http://www.meetup.com/EdTechMeetupCO/>) are
great ways to meet interested teachers in finding and building better
technical tools.

* How does Clever relate to SLC?

SLC is great for the districts that use it. We're proud to support them. But
for the vast majority of districts out there that don't have SLC, Clever can
help them open up their data in under 5 minutes.

* Will Clever be at SLC Camp?

I'm not sure if we'll make it for the entire weekend, but we'll definitely be
around. Come say hi!

------
stevekinney
As a New York City public school teacher, I am incredibly excited about
Clever. When I started working at my current school, we had an "inquiry team",
whose job it was to download spreadsheets from the myriad of different
services and databases used by the Department of Education (as well as those
adopted by my school in addition). The team would then go through the
downloaded spreadsheets and try to make sense of the data by copying and
pasting columns from one sheet to the other. The team consisted of about 5
teachers who spent hours of their own time doing this.

I wrote some database software that took a lot of the hurt out of the process.
Pop in the data in CSV format and it crunches all of the numbers and connects
all the dots. That said, the whole workflow is still a bit of a pain. Most of
the data is locked up in silos lacking any sort of API, but sporting a user
interface that compels a little piece of my soul to shrivel up every time I
have to log in and download the CSVs. Additionally, I have to bother the
school support staff because I don't even have access to some of the data.
Each different data source requires me to write a different parser. In the
mean time, I still have to plan lessons and teach kids.

I've kicked the tires on the Clever API and it's fantastic for my purposes.
They've done some incredibly cool stuff to make it easy to access data I've
previously struggled to get my hands on. I'm really excited about the work
they're doing and super-excited for more partners to come on board and use
their API. It's going to change the way we deal with student data and
ultimately get quicker information out to our teachers so that they can make
better instructional decisions for our students.

