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Name: Three Ring
Quick Pitch: Create and share digital portfolios of students' work quickly and easily.
Genius Idea: Three Ring allows teachers and students to digitize student work by snapping pictures or videos with their mobile or tablet devices. It keeps student work at the center of the conversation and ensures work isn't reduced to a rote grade or forgotten in a filing cabinet.
Crumpled assignments drifting to the bottom of students' backpacks may soon be an experience of the past. A new app called Three Ring is seeking to change the future of digital classrooms everywhere. With a smartphone or a tablet, the app allows teachers to take a photo or video recording of student work and then seamlessly view and share the work online. Three Ring is a digital filing cabinet that could improve the grading experience and allow teachers and parents to better track student performance.
Three Ring is already in the hands of almost 2,000 teachers in New York, Delaware and Maryland. Since the startup launched six weeks ago, Three Ring has already turned heads. It swooped up the Best Education Startup at New York Tech Day last week.
Three friends — Alec Turnbull, Michael Lindsay and Steve Silvius — who share a passion for education reform joined to create Three Ring. Silvius has taught in LA charter schools.
"Portfolios are powerful tools for teachers, but they have been difficult to maintain," Lindsay says. "This app solves that problem and captures the richness of the classroom experience that is lost from the conversation. It allows educators to go beyond the grade and bring student work to the forefront."
The app, currently looking for seed funding, is not fully developed yet. It's in beta and available only for teacher use. The trio is in the process of developing parent, student and administrator access as well. In the future, teachers will be able to send a students' work with comments and a grade directly to parents. The startup plans to sell the service to any schools that want to use Three Ring.
Here's how it works: First, the teacher takes a picture of the students' work, then tags the photo with appropriate labels including the name, assignment, type of work and what common core standards the assignment meets.
From there, the teacher can access the students' work on the Three Ring website from a tablet or computer. The teacher can create different classes and find students' work that way, or just search by student name. The teacher can label and group assignments such as drafts, sketches, assignments, exam, etc. The teacher can then quickly scroll through student work and comment on assignments. Teachers will no longer have to thumb through papers to find the exam they're looking for.
Lindsay makes it clear that Three Ring is not meant to be a replacement for pencil and paper assignments. The app is more like a digital filing cabinet that will lighten the weight of homework teachers carry home to grade and serves as a digital record of students' progress. Lindsay also says he was surprised by how many teachers want to know how a student is performing in other courses they're not teaching. Three Ring makes it easy for teachers to share student work between classrooms.
"It takes hours to create your own filing system and Three Ring can be a huge time saver," Lindsay says. "We allow teachers to bring that kind of work online quickly and accurately."
Below is an example of what Three Ring looks like online.
What are the most useful implementations of tech in the classroom you've seen? Tell us in the comments.
Image courtesy of Flickr, flickingerbrad
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
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