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As a young sixth-grade teacher at Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in Boston, Alex Grodd was frustrated.
“The core anxiety and frustration that I experienced every night was trying to find good lessons, and ending up writing them from scratch,” he said.
So he decided to go out and form an online social media company.
Teachers have always shared lesson plans, but Grodd thought they could do it more easily and on a much bigger scale. Together with technical co-founder Jonathan Hendler, he launched Somerville-based Better Lesson LLC. The site launched in alpha test mode four months ago with about 200 teachers and will move into beta this August, he said. So far, there are about 2,000 lessons and files up.
“We’re trying to be somewhere between Facebook for teachers and YouTube for lessons,” he said.
Grodd said the product will be sold on a freemium model, with entry-level applications available free, while more robust capabilities and customizations can be sold under subscription to school administrators. He said charter schools like Roxbury Prep are a target category.
It’s been tough to get teachers to adopt technology like this, acknowledged Jennifer Carolan, teaching and learning specialist at the NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit education-focused venture capital firm based in San Francisco.
NewSchool has participated in a $200,000 tranche of a $450,000 seed round for Better Lesson, closed earlier this month. The venture funding adds to a friends and family round Grodd said he initially raised.
Teachers aren’t averse to technology – rather, the clunky intranet solutions school districts have tried have not met web-savvy teachers’ expectations, Carolan said.
“Teachers are used to, on their own free time, using Google and other consumer technology products that have taken advantage of the latest technologies, and then they go to work and they use these obsolete, dated technology tools,” she said.
Grodd said he has worked almost exclusively on designing the site with teachers in mind, while co-founder Hendler, formerly a developer at a Cambridge design shop, has handled the technology. The two met at a networking cocktail event, Grodd said.
“The key to a non-technical startup founder is finding the right technical partner,” he said.
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