Creating lesson plans, learning about teaching methods, and finding new educational material are all part of a normal workday for teachers, but it can be difficult because most educators have extremely tight schedules. TeachPitch.com wants to help by bringing teachers around the world closer together so they can find and share the best resources on the web.
The site, which launched officially in October, now has around 2,000 teachers from 55 countries on its platform, most from the U.S. and Asia. TeachPitch hopes to build traction in South American countries—including Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina, and Peru—by partnering with local educational organizations like Fundación Fidal and launching a Spanish version of the site.
The startup was founded by Aldo de Pape, who spent two years teaching high school-level economics, English, and Dutch in the Netherlands. He says the site was created to cut the amount of time educators need to spend looking for lesson plans, teaching material, and other resources.
“If you are a mathematics teacher in second grade and you look for a lesson plan on Google, you will get 1.5 million results, all separate links from different sources all over the web. It’s basically not doable for a teacher to identify the best resources out there,” says de Pape. “As a former teacher, I wanted to make life easier for teachers to dive in deeper with the time and budget constraints that they have.”
TeachPitch lets users share content and start discussions in four categories, including individual subjects; classroom or school management; pedagogy; and technology. Subcategories include training, online tutoring, lesson plans, and videos.
Teachers can share and comment on materials they find online, as well as their own lesson plans.
Links to each teacher’s favorite online material can be stored and sorted in their personal “library” and shared through their profiles. In the future, de Pape says TeachPitch will add features that will allow teachers to collaborate on different projects, including teaching materials and agenda management for classes.
De Pape identifies BloomBoard, another platform for educators, as a competitor, but says TeachPitch is different because it focuses on teaching resources instead of professional development and performance assessments. Edmodo is another potential rival, but it focuses on helping parents and teachers collaborate, while TeachPitch is targeted solely to educators.
TeachPitch plans to monetize by making paid online tools targeted toward schools, while keeping resources for individual teachers free. The startup is also exploring content partnerships with publishers and sites.
The startup currently has angel funding and is in discussions with venture capital firms for its seed round, says De Pape.
Comment