Fight back? Yes, fight back. Teachers have for about 30 years seen their salaries remain stagnant as their classrooms grew to the point of overcrowding, if not overflowing, only to find themselves with more and more take-home work needed to truly teach our children.
Enter Walter O. Duncan IV, sitting in his living room, demonstration a new piece of software designed to eliminate a few of the problems teachers face. With no insult to Mr. Duncan intended, the aforementioned living room is indicative of the paltry salaries teachers earn. In this video, Mr. Duncan demonstrates his program/app entitled ‘Quick Key’. The video quickly went viral with 260,000 views on YouTube and a brief place on the front page of Reddit.
What’s all the excitement about? Along with Isaac D. Van Wesep, and Marlon Davis, Mr. Duncan demonstrated a grading app that they developed which allowed him to use his phone, and as fast as he could flip through his students quizzes, he was able to immediately see how they fared. Additionally, the app was uploading the results to his schools’ performance database.
The three started the company Designed by Educators, Inc. and were able to raise nearly $100,000 to build this prototype before beginning beta-testing. “We worked hard to build an amazing prototype. But now we need real teachers to beta test Quick Key. My goal was to recruit 100 teachers with the video. As of tonight, over 1,000 people have signed up to learn about beta testing,” said Duncan.
“We do not have customers as we are pre-beta but the video did drive over 10,000 visitors to our site in 48 hours,” said Van Wesep. “Our company is the only one making a product like Quick Key with real working K-12 teachers on the founding team. Since teachers designed Quick Key, it actually works for teachers, instead of making work for teachers.”
It’s unfortunate my mother retired from teaching before this came into the market. I remember her spending hours each evening on take-home work, often working well past midnight before waking up at 5AM for the first leg of her daily commute of nearly three hours. This she did while I made more money as a waiter and paid less in taxes.
“If teachers make the best assessments, and the best lesson plans, and the best teaching materials, won’t they make the best software too? the response to Quick Key is bearing out that theory,” finished Van Wesep.
I wish them all the best. An app that saves thousands of teachers time, while hopefully making these gentlemen a handful of money is fantastic. God knows they won’t be making millions in their day jobs.
