In this digital age, where it is quite ubiquitous to see the usage of tablets, and smart boards for teaching; we seem to have overlooked the scenes behind the life of a teacher. It consists of filling report cards manually, maintaining the record of the student’s progress; let alone their names.
Image Source: The New Indian Express
While this can be perceived as quite uninteresting and mundane by the teachers, ReportBee, a brainchild of Anantaraman Mani, Anjan T, Balaganesh S and Vinod Kumar, comes to the rescue.
He discusses the justification of the digitalisation, evaluation techniques and the dream team behind one of India’s most successful educational startups, he has also proved his mettle, having employed this technique in schools across India.
Efficient organisational skills, lesser hassles and giving teachers more time to be fair to the job that they do the best; i.e teaching with all their hearts. Here is an interview with Anantraman Mani, one of the founders of ReportBee.
What exactly is Report Bee? Our readers would like to know how this concept works.
Report Bee’s goal is to help anyone improve their learning! We believe this can be done by measuring progress of learning and guiding them at an appropriate time. At schools Report Bee’s software helps teachers to capture the progress of everyone student granularly.
Imagine a simple learning progress chart that talks to a child, guides parents, debates with teachers and challenges school leaders. Well Report Bee is loved exactly for the above-imagined reasons.
Manually making a report card was always considered to be quite a mundane documentation job by most of the teachers, thus I would like to ask you how did this idea germinate?
It was need of the hour, as your questions point out; it is really useful to reduce the mundane documentation job. Apart from reducing the mundane task another critical problem faced in education is that lots of money is spent on education but decisions were largely driven by untested opinions.
There is real need to make data-driven decision. Report Bee is changing the way learning progress is measured and accounted. Report Bee is transforming as an every-day tool for Teacher to harness relevant insights, to help them in designing their classes to be far more efficient. Parents are able to understand their children better.
Image Source: The Economic Times
This concept is already getting welcomed by the government schools in Tamil Nadu. But how are the reactions of those veteran teachers who are still not well versed with technology?
Initially there was apprehension, however once they have used the system (1 or 2 times) they love it as it reduces their boring work. We had teachers who were about the retire in 8 months and never used computer in their lives have mastered Report Bee and shared words of appreciation.
Do you support this idea of evaluating different students, coming from different family backgrounds having different levels of intellect on the basis of a common criterion of evaluation?
Standard evaluation has its values, however assessments should be broader and more helpful. Assessment should aid personalized diagnosis and guide the students with specific learning path.
Since, this is a relatively new concept in India, where do you see the future of this company in the coming years?
The concept is old but it was tried in different system like school management system or ERP. However the focus wasn’t clear and the never delivered. Report Bee is the first system with clear focus and is delivering on the promise of data-driven school system.
In the coming years, we want every-school to make data-driven decision and help each students in a personalized and caring way. Make students better in their quest to learn.
Tell us a little bit about the market that you are trying to tap into.
Our market is mainly India; this is most vibrant and largest market. It also the most challenging and demanding, creating value here is important. We see India as the innovation hub for world-class education solutions.
Image Source: Twitter
It is safe to say that today, we live in quite an ‘electronic’ world today, from robots being used to operate humans to a digital application tracking the progress of students. Do you think such an artificial intelligence is detrimental to the economy as far as the employment modules are concerned?
Even a kitchen knife is detrimental! The tools as such aren’t detrimental, it’s always the people using it. Caring and well-meaning humans will find a way for progress and greedy ones will find a way to destroy.
Take the example of Tractor, one of the initial arguments is it will take away the jobs of low-paying back-breaking farm labors. Now, we have better arguments on how Tractors are changing farming.
What is the structure of the team that works behind the success of Report Bee?
We have 3 teams – The happiness, growth and creation team. The creation team creates the software solution, happiness team makes sure users are really happy using it and growth makes sure more people are using the solutions.
What, according to you are one of the biggest challenges, of the digitalisation of the school reports?
A Challenge; for us is that most of the key decision makers in school aren’t connected with every-day running of the school, so they might be able to appreciate the real-value at the ground level.
Is there anything that you would like to share with our readers; any message for the early ‘startup’ CEOs?
Understand economics of the market, clarity on the problem and the value delivered and form a great team.
Tags: Anantaraman Mani Indian startups ReportBee
