In case you haven’t noticed, we have quite the education-tech cluster forming around Boston. May I direct your attention westward, out to Worcester, MA, and a new startup called K12 Kit, which is making its software broadly available today.
The idea is to provide a cloud-based software platform for K-12 schools and their students to communicate, collaborate, and publish content within their community. Think calendars, school newspapers, yearbooks, sports clubs, and school-wide announcements.
From what I can tell, nobody has yet cracked the “social/collaborative platform for schools” nut—it’s a tough market. Students tend to use some combination of Facebook, texting, and group messaging. Teachers and administrators use e-mail and various spreadsheets and in-house collaboration systems. What K12 Kit is building sounds a little bit like offerings from Edmodo, Scholabo, and Schoology; my guess is it specializes more in building community tools and less on the classroom learning process.
K12 Kit is bootstrapped and led by founder, CEO, and serial entrepreneur Steve Rothschild. Previously he was the CEO of Furniture.com, Bulbs.com, Empire Furniture Showrooms, and (most recently) Applied Interactive, a lead generation service. It will be interesting to see what insights he brings to the ed-tech sector.
Here’s a short e-mail interview with Rothschild:
Xconomy: Why do schools and students need this? What is the big problem you’re solving?
Steve Rothschild: The majority of the population has grown up in a computerized world. Students spend lots of time on social networks, creating and consuming media. Schools have not kept up, as students create
