Teacher Built This iPad App: How It Cuts Grading Busywork And Keeps Focus On Students
7:30 PM, last March, my kitchen table. Sticky ring from the lemonade my 7-year-old spilled before she left for her grandma’s, half-eaten bowl of microwaved mac and cheese congealing next to my laptop, a red pen that leaked through a stack of 28 exit tickets and left a pink stain on my favorite jeans. I was three hours into transferring my handwritten progress notes to the district’s required spreadsheet, and I still had to cross-reference every score with last month’s benchmark to flag who needed extra support before state testing. I’d been grading for four hours straight, and I realized I couldn’t remember one specific thing: why Mia Carter had stumbled through three out of five words on her running record that week. I’d scribbled “struggling with fluency” on a sticky note, but I couldn’t remember if it was because she was distracted by her new baby brother at home, or if she actually didn’t know the words.
I’ve taught 4th grade at a public elementary outside Portland for nine years. For as long as I can remember, I’ve juggled a dozen different tools to track what my kids need: a clipboard for running records, sticky notes for quick check-ins, a spreadsheet for grades, a separate notebook for social-emotional notes like “Liam had a fight with his best friend this week, needs extra check-ins.” Half the time, the sticky notes fall off my clipboard and get lost in the bottom of my teacher bag, or I can’t read my own handwriting by the end of a busy day. I tried every app on the market for classroom tracking. Most required 20 minutes of setup per student, or charged enough that I couldn’t pay for it out of my own teacher pocket (we don’t get a tech budget at my school). The ones that were free only did one thing—just grading, just attendance, just behavior notes—and I didn’t want to toggle between three different apps mid-lesson just to track one kid’s progress.
That night in March, after I closed my laptop and poured the congealed mac and cheese down the drain, I texted my little brother, who’s a software developer, and asked him if he’d teach me enough to build a simple app that does what I actually need. He said he’d do it if I bought him pizza every Sunday for six months. That’s how Scholaris started. It’s just an iPad app, built by me, for teachers like me who just need something simple to track progress on the go.
Last Tuesday, I was sitting with my small group math for multi-digit multiplication, my iPad propped on the edge of the kidney table. As each kid worked through their problem out loud, I tapped their name on the screen, tapped the pre-loaded skill “multi-digit multiplication with regrouping,” and tapped 1, 2, or 3 for whether they needed more support, were approaching, or had mastered it. When Javier paused halfway through and said he couldn’t remember where to put the carried zero, I just hit the voice note button and said “Needs another small group session tomorrow, confused about zero placeholders,” and that was it. The whole process took 10 seconds, and I never stopped the flow of the lesson to fumble for a pen or a sticky note. Before Scholaris, I would have tried to remember Javier’s gap, write it down after the group, and 9 times out of 10 I’d forget the specific detail and have to pull him out of recess to recheck, which no one wants.
This isn’t just about making my job easier, though it does that. Most people don’t realize how much of a teacher’s time is spent on admin that doesn’t actually touch kids. I calculated it once: I spend about 3 hours a week just entering progress data into different systems. That’s 3 hours I could be planning that hands-on volcano unit my kids have been asking for, or calling a parent to check in about a kid who’s been acting out, or grading the personal narrative essays that actually tell me how my kids are thinking, not just whether they got a multiple choice question right.
For other teachers who are fed up with their current tracking tools, the concrete thing I tell them is this: any tool that takes more than 2 minutes total per class period to use isn’t worth it. If you have to stop teaching to enter data, it defeats the whole purpose. You don’t need 50 extra features you’ll never touch; you just need something that does the 3 core things you do every day, fast. For parents, this is why your kid’s teacher might take a day or two to get back to your email, or why report cards feel generic some times. It’s not that we don’t care. It’s that we’re spending hours moving numbers from one spreadsheet to another, instead of doing the work that actually matters for your kid.
I released Scholaris as a free beta last fall, and right now about 120 other teachers are using it, sending me notes about what works and what doesn’t. I just fixed a bug last week that made the voice notes cut off halfway, and I’m still working on dark mode for older iPads, which a bunch of 3rd grade teachers have been asking for. It’s not perfect. There are still days I fumble with it when my hands are covered in glue from art class, and I still forget to tap a note once in a while. It’s not a big fancy corporate product with a huge marketing budget, it’s just what a teacher needed that didn’t exist, so I built it.
Right now, I cut my after-school admin time by almost half, which means I get to leave work by 6 PM twice a week, and I get to read my own daughter bedtime stories more than once a week. That’s enough for me, for now. I’m still fixing bugs, still adding small features teachers ask for, one Sunday pizza session at a time. It’s a work in progress, just like most things in teaching.
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