Why One Teacher Built Scholaris, An iPad App For Teachers By A Teacher
It’s 7:12 a.m. in my 3rd grade classroom, the coffee in my peeling 2022 3rd grade reusable tumbler is still steaming, and I’m folding crumpled construction paper left over from yesterday’s art project while waiting for the first kid to show up. Three years ago, this same 10 minutes would have been spent hunched over my desk, scribbling student progress notes on 28 different index cards, trying to remember who struggled with two-digit subtraction yesterday and who still couldn’t remember their silent e rules.
I’d tried every digital tool out there. The ones the district buys are clunky, built to tick state reporting boxes for admins, not to help me track what I see day to day. Other popular apps were either too expensive for a teacher paying out of pocket, or loaded with 100 features I’ll never use – I don’t need a built-in lesson plan generator for my science units, I just need to jot down that Javi got through three chapters of his independent reading book without stopping to ask what every other word means. Once I spent 20 minutes clicking through menus just to mark that one student met their fluency goal, and I closed the app and went right back to sticky notes that fell out of my lesson plan book by the end of the week.
The turning point was fall 2019 parent-teacher conferences. I had a stack of notes sorted by kid, and Mrs. Lopez, Mia’s mom, asked how Mia was doing with asking for help when she got stuck on a problem. I sorted through three weeks of neon sticky notes, found a half-scrawled note from two weeks prior that said “Mia holds hand up less lately,” but couldn’t tell her if it was getting better, if it only happened in math or reading, or how often it was happening compared to the start of the year. I left that conference frustrated. I had all that information in my head, I just didn’t have a simple way to pull it up when I needed it.
That night, I started messing around with app design. I’d taken a couple of basic coding classes in college for fun, never thought I’d use them for anything other than fixing a silly personal blog. At first, I tried to add everything I thought I needed: attendance, grade tracking, lesson plan templates, behavior logs. After a month of working on it after school and on weekends, I realized I was making the same mistake all the other edtech developers made – I was building something bloated that I’d never actually use. I cut 90% of the features, and focused on the one thing I actually needed: quick, on-the-go observation and progress notes that work on my iPad, which I carry with me around the classroom every day. That’s how Scholaris started.
Last week, I was sitting at my kidney table doing small group math, working on fractions with four kids. Maya drew three fraction problems on her small whiteboard, and I noticed she still wasn’t splitting her shapes into equal parts every time. Before Scholaris, I would have made a mental note to write that down after class, but 10 minutes later we had a surprise fire drill, then it was lunch, then we did a read aloud for Red Ribbon Week, and that mental note would have been gone by the time I sat down to do progress reports. Instead, I pulled my iPad off the corner of the table, opened Scholaris, tapped Maya’s name, tapped the pre-loaded “fractions” skill tag, and typed “needs practice dividing shapes into equal parts” – that took 8 seconds, I counted once. Then we went right back to working through the problem, no disruption to the group, no lost note.
What most people don’t get about teaching is that the most useful information about a kid isn’t the end-of-unit test score. It’s all the small, daily observations: how they ask for help, what skills they stumble on consistently, when they make a jump and get something they’ve been working on for months. For parents, that’s the information you actually want too, right? A report card that just says “developing” in reading comprehension doesn’t tell you much. A list of specific observations from throughout the semester tells you exactly what to work on at home.
The biggest thing I’ve learned building this app is that the best tools for education are the ones that get out of the way. If you’re a teacher testing a new app, and it takes more than 10 seconds to log a quick note, you won’t use it, no matter how many fancy features it has. That same logic applies to parents tracking their kid’s progress at home, too. You don’t need an expensive subscription service to help your kid work through a learning gap. Just open a new note in your phone, make a bullet for each skill you’re watching, and jot a 5-word note when you notice something. It takes less time than scrolling through Instagram, and it’s way more useful than trying to remember everything when you meet with the teacher.
I’ve been working on Scholaris for four years now, and it’s still not done. I test new features with the other 12 teachers at my school who use it, and adjust things based on what they say. Last month a 4th grade teacher told me she needed to add custom skill tags for writing conventions, so I built that in. Last week a first grade teacher said she wanted bigger buttons, since she’s often holding a kid in one hand and her iPad in the other, so I adjusted the sizing. It still doesn’t sync to our district’s student information system, that’s the next thing on my list. Sometimes it crashes if I have too many photos of student work attached to notes, and I haven’t figured out that bug completely.
This afternoon after school, I sat at my desk and fixed a glitch that was making skill tags load slowly. A mom of one of my students emailed me this morning, after I shared Mia’s progress notes with her at conferences, asking if I ever thought about making a parent version to track kid progress between doctor and teacher appointments. I added that to my to-do list. I don’t know if it’ll ever be on the app store for every teacher to download, or if it’ll stay just a small tool for me and the other teachers at my school who use it. But what I do know is that for the first time in 10 years of teaching, I don’t leave school every day with a pocket full of crumpled sticky notes I have to sort through that night. I can answer a parent’s question in 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes of digging through messy folders. That’s enough, for now.
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