After months of experimenting, Teacher Tapp is now live.
But where did the idea start?
It began with a simple question.
How would the world be different if you knew what teachers were thinking at any given moment?
Imagine if that was possible. If you could pin-point struggling teachers, then you could intervene and reduce turnover. If you could see how many teachers were struggling with behaviour, or curriculum, or if they were teaching in lots of classrooms, it might tell us why so many are struggling. Or, imagine being able to know, instantly, that the latest announcement by a politician was wildly unpopular. With that information you might be able to stop the silliness of its implementation before it even began.
Believing a method must be possible for uncovering such information, Becky plugged away for years trying to figure out how to do it. She experimented with different types of web-based and email surveys, but they don’t work so well for a profession that rarely gets to sit down at a desk! Eventually, the technology caught up. She decided to design an app with the help of Tom Forth and Daniel Billingsley at Imactivate.
Having worked in 2014 with Laura McInerney on the Touchpaper Questions – an event which got teachers to look at complicated problems in education and try to solve them – the pair decided to work together again and build the app as an experiment. Could the tool help solve the outstanding complicated problems by providing a route to new information?
As the app developed it became clear that extra computing skills would be needed. Alex Weatherall, a science teacher with a programming bent, was the obvious person to help out. Smart, helpful, and a whizz at scripts, he was able to automate the tricky parts of the data process.
After a summer of experiments and fiddling… the app was now ready.
Are you ready to join in?