Teacher Explains: Why I Built Scholaris, A Teacher-Made iPad App For Classrooms
It’s 8:12 a.m. on a Tuesday in October, and my coffee’s gone cold on the front desk. One kid’s crying because he dropped his peanut butter cracker on the floor, another’s waving a nurse pass for a bee sting, three hands shoot up for bathroom passes, and I can’t find my clipboard. The one with two weeks of reading log checks, half-scrawled behavior notes, and the list of kids who still haven’t turned in their field trip forms. I’d left it on the playground after recess, and when I ran back it was gone, thrown out with the discarded snack wrappers by the custodian. That’s the day I decided I’d had enough of how we track the small, daily stuff in the classroom.
I’ve been teaching 3rd grade at a small public elementary outside Portland for eight years. For as long as I can remember, the go-to for quick daily tracking was a clipboard and a stack of half-printed sheets. When the district pushed new classroom management apps a few years back, I tried them. First one cost $12 a month out of my pocket because our building didn’t have budget for building-wide access. It had a full gradebook, a parent messaging portal, a points-based behavior reward system, and it took seven clicks just to mark a kid absent. I stopped using it after three weeks. Another one was free, but it was full of ads that popped up mid-lesson when I tried to pull up a kid’s note. Nothing fit. All the tools are built for people who don’t stand in this spot, juggling 10 things at once before the morning bell even rings.
I messaged my brother, who does software development, and reminded him he’d promised to teach me basic Swift for iPad apps a couple years back, when I was complaining about this over Thanksgiving dinner. He sent me a few beginner tutorials, and I started tinkering after my 7-year-old son went to bed each night. I didn’t set out to build something for anyone but me. I just wanted an app that opened straight to my class list, let me mark attendance in two taps, and let me jot a quick note tagged to a kid that I could pull up two months later for conferences. I called it Scholaris, after the old reading rewards program we had when I was a kid, just a name I pulled out of thin air.
That first semester using it, I didn’t lose a single note. When the school counselor asked me for a run-down of when my student with anxiety had outbursts, I didn’t have to sift through 10 crumpled sheets of paper, I just pulled up his tag and there was the list, dated, with what was going on that day. When parent-teacher conferences rolled around that first year, I didn’t spend the whole weekend before scrambling to re-build my notes from memory. I had 10 minutes of prep per kid, instead of an hour. That freed up time to bake cookies for conference night, and actually talk to parents instead of squinting at messy handwriting.
That’s the thing no one talks about when it comes to education technology: every minute a teacher spends fumbling with a bad tool is a minute they don’t spend with kids. For parents, that means your kid’s teacher doesn’t have an extra two minutes to ask how your kid’s weekend went, or sit with them when they’re upset about a fight with a friend. When conferences roll around, it means the notes the teacher has are vague, because they couldn’t keep track of the small moments that add up to a full picture of your kid. That’s the problem I was trying to fix, not reinvent the whole education system.
After a few months, the other 3rd grade teachers in my building saw me using it between classes, and asked if they could download it. I put it on the App Store for $2.99, no subscriptions, no in-app purchases. I don’t want to make a fortune off this, I just want to cover the $99 annual cost of the developer account. What I’ve found, talking to other teachers who use it now, is that most of us just want the same thing: simple tools that do the few things we actually need, without all the fluff.
If you’re a teacher frustrated with the tools you’re given, here’s what I’ve learned that sticks. You don’t need a fancy district-approved system to track the small stuff. There’s no rule that says you have to use the one-size-fits-all app everyone else is pushing. Before you commit to a new tool, ask yourself two questions: do I actually use all its features? Does it take fewer steps than what I’m doing right now? If the answer to either is no, ditch it. Even a small, simple app built for your specific needs will save you more time than any overpriced system with 100 features you’ll never touch.
For parents, this explains a lot of the small delays you might notice. If your kid’s teacher can’t get back to you right away with that quick question about a permission slip, they’re not ignoring you. More often than not, they’re wading through three different clunky systems to find the answer. Simple tools don’t just make a teacher’s job easier, they make communication faster and clearer for you, too. Last month I had a conference with a mom of a kid who’d been acting out the past couple months. Instead of saying “he’s been disruptive lately,” I could pull up my notes and say “he’s had eight outbursts in the past six weeks, all right after we switch from reading to math, and all on Wednesdays and Thursdays, which are the days he has PE before math.” Turns out, he’d been embarrassed about changing for PE in front of the other kids, and that stress was carrying over into class. That specific note let us problem-solve together, instead of just guessing what was going on.
Scholaris is still a work in progress. I get a couple emails a week from teachers asking for small tweaks: a first grade teacher wants a checkbox to track who’s had their snack, a special ed teacher wants to add photos of student work to notes, a high school art teacher wants to track who’s checked out a paintbrush. I add what I can, when I can, after grading papers and helping my son with his homework and folding laundry. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t do grade calculations or send report cards or sync to the district’s massive data system. That’s the point. It’s just a tool, built by a teacher, for the small daily stuff that adds up to the whole school year. I still keep a spare clipboard by the door, just in case my iPad dies. But I haven’t lost two weeks of notes in three years. That’s enough for me.
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