Chalk is a 5-year-old company that is growing rapidly. It was initially created to help teachers save time on their planning. Our focus has always been to help teachers (we love them!), and now we have evolved to assisting entire schools and districts. It’s been a crazy and rewarding ride for Chalk.
What is Chalk?
- A platform that helps align and utilize a curriculum on an administrative level, so teachers know what skills students need in a specific grade.
- The apps within Chalk (lesson planner, digital gradebook, and curriculum mapper) communicate with each other, so administrators and teachers are on the same page when it comes to educating students.
- Throughout this whole process, we get real-time classroom insights to drive operational performance and academic results.
- Our most popular app, the one that started it all, is heavily used by teachers – Planboard.
What is Planboard?
Planboard creates an experience when it comes to lesson planning. Planboard’s intuitive platform has several features that allow teachers to efficiently plan their lessons, link multimedia features and organize their ideas in a visually pleasing way.
A week view of Planboard:
Benefits
During my last year of teaching, I explored apps that would help me lesson plan. I ended up using Planboard and these are some of the benefits I personally discovered:
- Ability to create interactive lessons where I’d attach YouTube videos, audio files, create charts, and even share my week’s lesson plans with my principal.
- My plans were accessible on my iPhone. (It’s now accessible on any iOS and Android devices!)
- It was super easy to take attendance. In a day’s view of Planboard, the Attendance app pops out, so it was easy to take attendance.
- I easily copied and moved lessons to different days. (You can also reuse an entire year’s worth of lessons the following year!)
- A lot of teachers who have created their lessons over the course of a year have reused them over subsequent years. From the feedback we get, it helps teachers differentiate their lessons for students.
- Schools that use Chalk’s Curriculum Solution see the biggest benefit and positive impact. A school would be able to store their content and align their curricula horizontally and vertically while making lesson planning easy for teachers.
Teacher feedback
We get excited when our teachers provide us with their feedback. Our whole platform has literally been designed by using teacher feedback. It’s so important to us! Here are a few comments from Twitter:
When all the little boxes for the week on @Planboard are full, I am happy.
Falling in love with @Planboard – where has it been all my life?!?!
Author Bio: Cedric D’Souza is a teacher turned educational tech enabler. He loves traveling and trying out new food… or any food for that matter!
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to him. Connect on LinkedIn, email cedric@chalk.com or check out this video he put together to see how Chalk works.
EDTECH 4 BEGINNERS 