LevelUP! + PRESS START combines industry leading technologies into one comprehensive and intuitive package.
OVERVIEW
We are a Learning management system (LMS) and student response system (SRS) for K-12 students that aids student engagement and motivation through gamification principles.
We are seeking $250,000 in seed funding to develop our product and bring it to market.
EXECUTIVE TEAM
Aaron Kaljanac, Founder and CEO, BC Certified teacher, and education technologist pursuing M.Ed. in Education Technology
Tanya Liu, Chief Technology Officer and Backend engineer.
Raphael Wan, Marketing and communications leader with an MBA from UBC
We also have numerous educators and education technology consultants on staff.
PROBLEM
Incorporating technology into the curriculum is a priority, and even a mandate in most schools today. The problem is finding ways to use the technology today so enhances learning rather than takes away from the core curriculum, and that means having a comprehensive, intuitive, and simple to use system that ties all the best education technologies together.
There are many worthwhile education technology products available on the market today, however this creates a problem, as educators are running into too many education technology choices. Educators have gone from a limited number of education technologies to being left with a barrage of decisions to make about how, and what technologies they will incorporate into the curriculum.
In the past, the main barrier to the integration of technology in the classroom was access to technological resources. However, as technology has become more pervasive in the classroom, the problem has evolved into how to manage all the different technologies educators want to incorporate into the classroom. With separate products for classroom management grading, attendance, quizzes, peer collaboration, student response etc., the problem is not finding an effective product, but deciding which ones to use, so as to not burden themselves and their students with numerous sites, apps, and products with separate log-ins, requiring numerous usernames and passwords, with disparate GUIs that may only run on certain devices. Even the most tech savvy educator would find it difficult to incorporate the stand-alone education technology products that LevelUP! + PRESS START provides, without disrupting the flow of the lesson. In pursuit simplicity and efficiency, many educators may forego worthwhile technologies that would have otherwise benefitted their students.
PRODUCT
LevelUP! + PRESS START
LevelUP! Is a level above other competing stand-alone products, and sets itself apart with its numerous integrated features. Our product combines the features of several industry leading Education Technology products into one comprehensive, simple and intuitive Facebook-like user interface.
At its core, LevelUP! is a robust learning management system (LMS) that makes it easier for teachers to manage their daily teaching tasks. LevelUP! streamlines the teachers workload making it easier to post assignments, maintain a calendar and record grades, so teachers can spend more time teaching and communicating with their class. It is a social networking learning platform with a familiar and intuitive interface, instructor tools, curriculum management features, detailed reporting and analytics of student performance over time.
LevelUP!’s integrated PRESS START student Response System lets teachers engage and assess their students with educational activities. Through the use of real time questioning, instant result aggregation and visualization, teachers can gauge the whole class’ current level of understanding. PRESS START saves teachers' time so the class can further collaborate, discuss, extend and grow as a community of learners.
PRESS START provides instant formative feedback, allowing teachers to know how every student is doing at any moment. Teachers usually assess student understanding by asking them or testing them. However this has its drawbacks as students are often afraid to admit that they don’t understand in front of their peers. With PRESS START’s student response system, when a teacher wants to check for understanding, they simply ask students to check in using the 5-level feedback scale that is permanently displayed on the student dashboard. This allows teachers to instantly and privately see whether students understand the topic. Teachers can also create multiple choice, true/false, graded short answer, or open-response questions, and to receive instant results on screen, allowing teachers to visualize student and whole class learning in real time.
Most teachers are looking for ways to make their classes more exciting and their students more engaged. PRESS START's gamification features take the stimulating aspects of video games and applies them to learning. These include online leaderboards and tools that automatically score and award points, XP, currency and badges when students complete tasks, assignments and display good behaviour. These extrinsic rewards are used as a way to motivate and track the progress of students, giving them ideas on how to improve next time or reward them for a job well done. In a classroom, gamification elements can have a profound impact on the engagement and motivation of students.
Most students enjoy video games because they are fun and challenging. They may fail at first, but most gamers persevere because they believe it is fun, and overcoming the challenge feels rewarding. This is what PRESS START's gamification features can do for learning. It can cause students to see assignments and tasks as an opportunity to achieve a further goal. Whether that goal is to master a subject area or to receive gamification harnesses those positive features and promotes inquiry based learning. PRESS START makes it easy for educators to implement gamification elements and strategies and into their classroom.
LevelUP! will be available for all web-connected devices including iOS, Android, Chrome, Kindle and Windows.
MARKET
Incorporating technology into the curriculum is a priority, and even a mandate in most schools today. LevelUP! competes with other LMS’ such as Moodle and Blackboard, and most closely with Edmodo due to its incorporation of social networking features and focus on the K-12 classroom market.
MARKET DIFFERENTIATION
LevelUP! is a social learning community where teachers, students and parents can connect and collaborate safely. It has the appeal of a social networking site, providing a relevant and engaging platform for social learning.
Unique to LevelUP! is the seamless combination of LMS, social networking, student response/feedback system, and gamification elements. The platform features strong security and privacy, compatibility across all web-enabled devices, easy log-in with a single sign-in to access all the features of the LevelUP! + PRESS START platform.
Industry leading products such as Edmodo and Schoology already tie together essential educational, time-saving tools to create comprehensive learning management systems. However, LevelUP! + PRESS START combines the best learning management features from Edmodo and Schoology with the automatic tracking and recording of student achievement and behavior from Class Dodo, and gamification elements such as online leaderboards, and badges featured in products such as ClassXP, Class Badges, Youtopia and Classcraft. This is coupled with the best features from instant student response and polling platforms such as Socrative, Geddit, Kahoot!, and Poll Everywhere.
MARKET POTENTIAL
LevelUP! has the potential to capture a significant portion of the market for both school institutions and individual teachers. LevelUP! offers the same level of sophistication as competing cloud-based LMS’ while offering additional features only available from outside solutions. LevelUP! + PRESS START offer the features that educators desire and are willing to pay for it. By combining industry leading features from LMS, social networking, student response systems, and gamification into one comprehensive package, LevelUP! has the potential ability to draw users from all its competing products. Most importantly, the features of LevelUP! + PRESS START are expertly incorporated in the Facebook-like GUI/Dashboard, creating an intuitive social networking LMS. LevelUP! will maintain a competitive advantage over other competing products because it is an integrated solution that perfectly syncs each feature into a seamless and intuitive package. This cannot be matched by any combination of its competing products.
In addition to capturing the existing LMS, social platform, student response system, and gamification market, there is tremendous growth potential as schools continue to adopt technology integration as its mandate. As long as technology advances and adoption continues to grow within schools, and teachers continue to embrace social learning, the market for LMS systems with social networking features with grow with it. The market for student response systems is moving into the mainstream as well, and well-positioned products such as PRESS START will be indispensible to the connected 1:1 classroom, especially as tablet classrooms become more widespread and as a BYOD solution in today’s increasingly connected world. Gamification is a relatively new avenue in education, but it is seeing tremendous growth in the advertising and marketing sector. There are few products that offer gamification features, and none that offer game elements that are as focused and extensive as LevelUP!. Because it is such a new market, there is even greater market potential for an effective product such as LevelUP! that leverages the motivational aspects of gamificiation to make learning fun.
BUSINESS MODEL
LevelUP! will use a “freemium” business model, marketing to both enterprise and end-users. Our direct marketing to teachers will offer our base LevelUP! LMS for free, with a tiered subscription to PRESS START, which will allow access to the student feedback and gamification features at a low monthly or yearly price point.
LevelUP! + PRESS START will be marketed to School Boards, Districts, and Institutions as a complete software suite to be licensed as a premium fee-based subscription service. The premium enterprise solution will feature premium tech support, additional backend features for large-scale integration and custom branding.
We are a Learning management system (LMS) and student response system (SRS) for K-12 students that aids student engagement and motivation through gamification principles.
We are seeking $250,000 in seed funding to develop our product and bring it to market.
EXECUTIVE TEAM
Aaron Kaljanac, Founder and CEO, BC Certified teacher, and education technologist pursuing M.Ed. in Education Technology
Tanya Liu, Chief Technology Officer and Backend engineer.
Raphael Wan, Marketing and communications leader with an MBA from UBC
We also have numerous educators and education technology consultants on staff.
PROBLEM
Incorporating technology into the curriculum is a priority, and even a mandate in most schools today. The problem is finding ways to use the technology today so enhances learning rather than takes away from the core curriculum, and that means having a comprehensive, intuitive, and simple to use system that ties all the best education technologies together.
There are many worthwhile education technology products available on the market today, however this creates a problem, as educators are running into too many education technology choices. Educators have gone from a limited number of education technologies to being left with a barrage of decisions to make about how, and what technologies they will incorporate into the curriculum.
In the past, the main barrier to the integration of technology in the classroom was access to technological resources. However, as technology has become more pervasive in the classroom, the problem has evolved into how to manage all the different technologies educators want to incorporate into the classroom. With separate products for classroom management grading, attendance, quizzes, peer collaboration, student response etc., the problem is not finding an effective product, but deciding which ones to use, so as to not burden themselves and their students with numerous sites, apps, and products with separate log-ins, requiring numerous usernames and passwords, with disparate GUIs that may only run on certain devices. Even the most tech savvy educator would find it difficult to incorporate the stand-alone education technology products that LevelUP! + PRESS START provides, without disrupting the flow of the lesson. In pursuit simplicity and efficiency, many educators may forego worthwhile technologies that would have otherwise benefitted their students.
PRODUCT
LevelUP! + PRESS START
LevelUP! Is a level above other competing stand-alone products, and sets itself apart with its numerous integrated features. Our product combines the features of several industry leading Education Technology products into one comprehensive, simple and intuitive Facebook-like user interface.
At its core, LevelUP! is a robust learning management system (LMS) that makes it easier for teachers to manage their daily teaching tasks. LevelUP! streamlines the teachers workload making it easier to post assignments, maintain a calendar and record grades, so teachers can spend more time teaching and communicating with their class. It is a social networking learning platform with a familiar and intuitive interface, instructor tools, curriculum management features, detailed reporting and analytics of student performance over time.
LevelUP!’s integrated PRESS START student Response System lets teachers engage and assess their students with educational activities. Through the use of real time questioning, instant result aggregation and visualization, teachers can gauge the whole class’ current level of understanding. PRESS START saves teachers' time so the class can further collaborate, discuss, extend and grow as a community of learners.
PRESS START provides instant formative feedback, allowing teachers to know how every student is doing at any moment. Teachers usually assess student understanding by asking them or testing them. However this has its drawbacks as students are often afraid to admit that they don’t understand in front of their peers. With PRESS START’s student response system, when a teacher wants to check for understanding, they simply ask students to check in using the 5-level feedback scale that is permanently displayed on the student dashboard. This allows teachers to instantly and privately see whether students understand the topic. Teachers can also create multiple choice, true/false, graded short answer, or open-response questions, and to receive instant results on screen, allowing teachers to visualize student and whole class learning in real time.
Most teachers are looking for ways to make their classes more exciting and their students more engaged. PRESS START's gamification features take the stimulating aspects of video games and applies them to learning. These include online leaderboards and tools that automatically score and award points, XP, currency and badges when students complete tasks, assignments and display good behaviour. These extrinsic rewards are used as a way to motivate and track the progress of students, giving them ideas on how to improve next time or reward them for a job well done. In a classroom, gamification elements can have a profound impact on the engagement and motivation of students.
Most students enjoy video games because they are fun and challenging. They may fail at first, but most gamers persevere because they believe it is fun, and overcoming the challenge feels rewarding. This is what PRESS START's gamification features can do for learning. It can cause students to see assignments and tasks as an opportunity to achieve a further goal. Whether that goal is to master a subject area or to receive gamification harnesses those positive features and promotes inquiry based learning. PRESS START makes it easy for educators to implement gamification elements and strategies and into their classroom.
LevelUP! will be available for all web-connected devices including iOS, Android, Chrome, Kindle and Windows.
MARKET
Incorporating technology into the curriculum is a priority, and even a mandate in most schools today. LevelUP! competes with other LMS’ such as Moodle and Blackboard, and most closely with Edmodo due to its incorporation of social networking features and focus on the K-12 classroom market.
MARKET DIFFERENTIATION
LevelUP! is a social learning community where teachers, students and parents can connect and collaborate safely. It has the appeal of a social networking site, providing a relevant and engaging platform for social learning.
Unique to LevelUP! is the seamless combination of LMS, social networking, student response/feedback system, and gamification elements. The platform features strong security and privacy, compatibility across all web-enabled devices, easy log-in with a single sign-in to access all the features of the LevelUP! + PRESS START platform.
Industry leading products such as Edmodo and Schoology already tie together essential educational, time-saving tools to create comprehensive learning management systems. However, LevelUP! + PRESS START combines the best learning management features from Edmodo and Schoology with the automatic tracking and recording of student achievement and behavior from Class Dodo, and gamification elements such as online leaderboards, and badges featured in products such as ClassXP, Class Badges, Youtopia and Classcraft. This is coupled with the best features from instant student response and polling platforms such as Socrative, Geddit, Kahoot!, and Poll Everywhere.
MARKET POTENTIAL
LevelUP! has the potential to capture a significant portion of the market for both school institutions and individual teachers. LevelUP! offers the same level of sophistication as competing cloud-based LMS’ while offering additional features only available from outside solutions. LevelUP! + PRESS START offer the features that educators desire and are willing to pay for it. By combining industry leading features from LMS, social networking, student response systems, and gamification into one comprehensive package, LevelUP! has the potential ability to draw users from all its competing products. Most importantly, the features of LevelUP! + PRESS START are expertly incorporated in the Facebook-like GUI/Dashboard, creating an intuitive social networking LMS. LevelUP! will maintain a competitive advantage over other competing products because it is an integrated solution that perfectly syncs each feature into a seamless and intuitive package. This cannot be matched by any combination of its competing products.
In addition to capturing the existing LMS, social platform, student response system, and gamification market, there is tremendous growth potential as schools continue to adopt technology integration as its mandate. As long as technology advances and adoption continues to grow within schools, and teachers continue to embrace social learning, the market for LMS systems with social networking features with grow with it. The market for student response systems is moving into the mainstream as well, and well-positioned products such as PRESS START will be indispensible to the connected 1:1 classroom, especially as tablet classrooms become more widespread and as a BYOD solution in today’s increasingly connected world. Gamification is a relatively new avenue in education, but it is seeing tremendous growth in the advertising and marketing sector. There are few products that offer gamification features, and none that offer game elements that are as focused and extensive as LevelUP!. Because it is such a new market, there is even greater market potential for an effective product such as LevelUP! that leverages the motivational aspects of gamificiation to make learning fun.
BUSINESS MODEL
LevelUP! will use a “freemium” business model, marketing to both enterprise and end-users. Our direct marketing to teachers will offer our base LevelUP! LMS for free, with a tiered subscription to PRESS START, which will allow access to the student feedback and gamification features at a low monthly or yearly price point.
LevelUP! + PRESS START will be marketed to School Boards, Districts, and Institutions as a complete software suite to be licensed as a premium fee-based subscription service. The premium enterprise solution will feature premium tech support, additional backend features for large-scale integration and custom branding.