Studyo’s little story

Back in 2013, I was working with a school district up in the province of Quebec in re-implementing their “one device per student” program. As coordinator of educational technology for this district, my mandate included supporting teachers in their desire to help students build 21st century skills. I loved technology and was a strong believer in the ways it could enhance learning.

It felt natural to try and implement educational technology platforms, such as portals and similar tools to Google Classroom to facilitate work for teachers. But resistance was strong. The tools were appreciated by some teachers, yet, teachers resisted using them exclusively. One tool was very hard to get rid of: the paper planner.

This felt like a failure to me. With all my experience with technology in education, shouldn’t I be able to find a fully digital solution? Was technology failing me? Or was I failing to see something important?

I asked myself: why are these teachers resisting? What is so important about paper planners that technology couldn’t replace them? I had to understand this or I would fail in my quest for a fully digital district. So I interviewed all our teachers, visiting schools and asking why they couldn’t replace paper planners with the tools I was proposing.

What followed was an eye-opening moment: digital tools forced teachers to enter everything for students, all the time. Teachers felt they were spoon-feeding their students, preventing them from building up their autonomy and responsibility. This meant too much extra work for teachers and no responsibility for students. Paper allowed less teacher work and more student autonomy. Until a tool was created which allowed both, they wouldn’t want to use it.

So that’s when I decided to find a tool that allowed both the practicality of posting assignments to students, yet preserve their autonomy in entering their own tasks and managing their workload.

Nothing existed. There were individual planners, yes, but nothing centrally connected to a school’s timetables and where teachers could post assignments and also enable students to enter their own tasks and manage all tasks in their workload. And these days, Students need modern project-management tools, not just enter tasks.

So I asked for help in building these solutions, and that’s when I met Pascal. He had been creating software for 20 years, and was the parent of two wonderful kids. He was definitely very interested in helping his own kids become more organized and responsible. He had built solid technological tools for a variety of needs, and was looking for a cause to apply his knowledge and passion. Helping students build essential skills for the future quickly became that cause.

Over the course of one year, we worked tirelessly building, testing and validating our ideas with schools. The system had to allow student-entered tasks. But also allow teachers to post. Parents should have access at all times to help their children. Tasks should be actionable and displayed clearly in each class, using bright colors and icons to make everything as clear as possible. Work should be marked as done and be represented by different types of icons to clarify all the work. And finally, teachers who already adopted digital tools, such as Google Classroom, shouldn’t have to enter tasks twice. No one wants to waste time.

So in the spring of 2014, we launched Studyo which was immediately adopted by a group of private and public schools in Quebec. And as the adoption of Studyo grew every year, the team increased in size and the number of schools grew. Nowadays, teachers and students from hundreds of schools use our platform each day to help students build their executive function skills and we have become an essential part of their toolkit.

Renaud