Teacherstack started with Jason Darnell wanting to solve a problem for his wife.
Amanda Darnell, a second-grade teacher at Riverton Elementary School in Huntsville, Ala., was telling Jason about how they used pocket charts in her classroom to run stations. But manually switching the tags on the pocket charts was time-consuming.
Jason, a software engineer with Daugherty Business Solutions, is passionate about solving problems using software and automation, and his wife’s pain point sounded like something that could be automated. So he gathered the right specs from her and built Teacherstack’s first application: Station Rotations.
Teacherstack is a website hosted in an Amazon Web Services environment, which today contains eight apps: Morning Work (part of which students pick their lunch options for the day), Random Students, Flashcards, Timer, To-Do List, Noise Meter and Seating Arrangement.
And Station Rotations has expanded its features. It now includes music, which cues the students that it’s time to move to the next station.
The quickest way to prove that something has value is whether people use it, especially people you don’t know, Jason said.
And this has been Jason’s experience with Teacherstack. Several of Amanda’s coworkers adopted it to their classrooms. And then the technology leader shared it at a district-wide technology conference. Eventually, it was even picked up by schools in different states.
“I really want it to be something that can help all teachers,” Jason said.
Today, about 1,300 teachers have registered with Teacherstack, with about 80 active users a week.
You can sign up for it here: www.teacherstack.com.
And if you’re a teacher, Jason encourages all the feedback, ideas and issues.
