Editor’s be aware: March is widely known as Ladies’s Historical past Month within the US. At Google, we’re proud to have fun girls from all backgrounds and are dedicated to growing the variety of girls within the know-how business. Over the subsequent few weeks, we’ll showcase women-led startups and the way they use Google Cloud to develop their companies.As we speak’s function highlights E-learning platform, Schoolio, and its co-founder, Lindsey Casselman.
I wish to say that my favourite factor about Schoolio is that it began with an act of kindness- and a chilly DM.
I started my profession as a instructor, with the keen hope of most new academics that I may make a distinction for teenagers. Just a few years later, with two children of my very own at school, I felt that I couldn’t change the system from inside, and noticed it as antiquated, and at greatest leaving children ill-prepared for the true world and the way forward for work. I left educating, and in 2015 I started homeschooling my youngsters, and by no means regarded again. As a homeschooler, I instantly found that after you allow the system, you’re by yourself. There’s little or no homeschool content material on the market, and even much less of it’s secular, inclusive, and variety pushed. I additionally discovered that many homeschooled youngsters are children with distinctive wants, as they’re probably the most poorly served in a standard classroom.
I used my information of schooling and expertise with youngsters with distinctive must create residence studying content material for my very own children, and I turned a frontrunner in the neighborhood, mentoring new homeschoolers by means of a Fb assist group I began, the place I’d usually share suggestions and a few of my home made educating supplies.
All the pieces modified in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. With thousands and thousands of youngsters out of the blue studying at residence, the variety of folks in my Fb group exploded, and lots of had been asking me to share extra of my home made content material with them, as they turned starkly conscious of the shortage of applicable supplies in the marketplace. It was nice to supply assist, however I knew I may do way more than simply share screenshots of my handwritten lesson plans. Fortunately the group additionally contained my co-founder, Sathish Bala, who reached out to me in what’s now a framed-in-the-office chilly DM, asking if I used to be curious about collaborating. Inside just a few weeks, in August 2020, we launched our first set of E-books for residence schooling, and Schoolio was born.
Sathish and I share a standard method to schooling. Schoolio is based on our perception that faculties should be reimagined for the fashionable world. We consider that schooling ought to put together youngsters for his or her actual futures, and that interest-based studying is what actually retains college students engaged and empowered. That is how they’ll develop to like studying, notice their very own potential, and be arrange for lifelong success.
After a profitable seed fundraise in 2021, we’ve been in a position to fully digitize our content material library into video format, and now provide the choices of pen-to-paper e book studying from the e-book retailer, or simple on-line entry by means of our studying platform to satisfy the wants of households throughout the globe. Our curriculum now consists of K8 core topics (math, language, science, and social research) for Canada and the U.S, plus a library of interest-based subjects, together with local weather science, a strong Monetary Literacy program, and an entire SEL (Social-emotional studying) library, my private passion-project, that helps children develop social expertise, emotional regulation methods, and character-building tools- wanted now greater than ever in our post-Covid world.
On the finish of 2022 we additionally launched an immersive studying atmosphere that takes youngsters right into a secure, curated 3D digital world. There’s actually no restrict to the tutorial experiences probably out there on this metaverse atmosphere, from happening a digital area journey to assembly academics and consultants from everywhere in the world.
As well as, we’re devoted to utilizing the most recent improvements in know-how to transcend tutorial assessments and assist youngsters uncover their passions and abilities, studying kinds and habits, strengths, and emotional well-being, as a part of a whole-child method to schooling. We consider there’s a lot extra to success than math scores!
