It’s hard enough for parents and kids trying to navigate remote learning from home. But for teachers forced to conduct classes online with just a small laptop, the experience can be even more stressful and ineffective.
A small group of Seattle startup veterans just launched an effort called Two Screens for Teachers that aims to give instructors a second monitor to help make their lives a little bit easier amid the pandemic.
Matt Lerner and Mike Mathieu are behind the idea. They previously co-founded Walk Score, a Seattle startup that sold to Redfin in 2014.
Lerner had a recent conversation with his neighbor, whose mother is a teacher in California struggling to teach online. He bought her a second monitor so she could see student faces on one screen, and her lesson plans on the other.
Lerner then hopped on the phone with Mathieu, who is chairman at Front Seat, a Seattle incubator that helps build social good businesses. The entrepreneurs were already working on a separate startup idea but this effort quickly became their new project.
Lerner recruited some of his former Walk Score colleagues — Dave Peck, Jesse Kocher, and Kenshi Kawaguchi — to help design an automated system that matches donors with teachers. Teachers can request a monitor on the website. It’s designed to help them pick the right video cable — a common roadblock Lerner found in his research.
Mathieu provided initial funding but the group is looking for individual donors, foundations, and corporate partners to help fund monitor purchases.
The goal is to deliver 250,000 monitors to public school K-12 teachers for this fall semester.
“We can get there,” Lerner said. “The need is real, and the desire to help is real.”
Lerner is confident they can hit that goal based on early feedback from teachers who received a monitor. They include Danielle Lotton-Barker, an instructor at Southwest Middle School in Lawrence, Kan., who is teaching from her room in the photo above. She is also helping her own two kids do remote learning from home.
Lerner said he “wasn’t thinking enough about the teachers.”
“I wasn’t thinking enough about what it’s like for them to have 20 of those kids online,” he said.
Donors can go here to buy a monitor; teachers can request one here.
