Company description
As social media components are brought into the classroom, student work is enhanced by the educational conversations with their peers. By working collaboratively, student education is no longer limited to teacher/student interaction, but expands into a participative dialogue and a proactive learning environment. With this in mind, 19Pencils has included an area called the Playground where students can digitally “talk” amongst themselves, sharing ideas and thoughts on the assigned content. In addition, during assigned multiple choice quizzes in 19Pencils, students have the option of declining to answer a question and going to the playground to ask their classmates for help. With this option, the students can work with their peers to better understand the topic being taught instead of guessing at the answer. This student collaboration is viewable by the teacher, allowing them to see who is taking an academic leadership role in the class, and who is struggling.
The mission of 19Pencils is to offer an educational eco-system for easy, efficient discovery and sharing of web-based content along with assessment tools (quizzes and a social "playground") that are extraordinarily simple to use yet effective in giving educators insight into their students' online activity. In addition, the easy tools offered in 19Pencils creates teamwork between teachers, encouraging them to share their curriculum materials and develop a network of teachers across the school, district, state and more.
Team
Jason is a 15+ year veteran of Adobe Systems, Inc. where he is a Computer Scientist. During his tenure at Adobe Jason has been a part of numerous products including Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. However, the majority of his career has been focused around consumer focused desktop/hybrid products including Adobe PhotoDeluxe, Adobe Photoshop Elements and the completely web-based Photoshop.com. Jason's work has included desktop feature implementation as well as conception and implementation of web service related features with support to a number of desktop applications. In addition Jason has worked extensively with 3rd parties on web service related implementation work including Kodak, Fuji, SmugMug and Konica.
Jason is the primary inventor of a recently issued software patent as well as contributor to a number of pending patents. Jason is a SF Bay Area native who transplanted to the Sacramento area where he lives with his wife and three sons.
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Neill began his technology career in 1992 by jumping into the “edutainment” software space. He founded a company targeting children aged 6-10 that he named CyberPuppy Software. Neill designed the user interface, wrote the product spec, researched the competition, recruited programmers, obtained funding, and secured retail distribution for the product, Kid’s Studio. It won a 1994 Codie award from the Software Publisher’s Association for Best School Productivity/ Creativity Program.
Since then Neill has been involved in numerous startup ventures as both a co-founder and an angel investor.
Business model
19Pencils will be available in two subscription models - Basic and Premium. The Basic subscription is free of charge and includes: a public class page, custom quiz creation, unlimited favorites, mobile access, public page “notes” from the teacher, and custom content filtering by grade, district and school. The Premium account is $29.95 per year and offers everything in the Basic subscription plus: unlimited student accounts and student specific analytics, parent access to student accounts, virtual rewards, student “playground” for collaboration among classmates, and the ability to give individual student assignments.
Competitive advantage
We believe our secret sauce is the conglomeration of social bookmarking, online assessments, internet monitoring, and social media engagement – all working together to simplify and improve the educational process for both teachers and students.
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Neill Kramer
