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Schools Clamored for Seesaw’s App. That Was Good News, and Bad News.

The first requests that upended Seesaw, a popular classroom app, came in January from teachers and education officials abroad. Their schools were shutting down because of the coronavirus, and they urgently wanted the app adjusted for remote learning. The company figured it could do that with a single short hackathon project. “We were so naive,” said Emily Voigtlander Seliger, a Seesaw product manager. Weeks later, reality hit: The virus spread to the United States, where more of the app’s users are. Seesaw had been designed for students in a classroom to submit an audio comment or a digital drawing after a lesson. But thousands of teachers suddenly wanted it to work as a full-featured home learning tool. Rather than using Seesaw for a couple of assignments a week, they were using it for hours each day. It seemed like every start-up’s dream: racing to keep up with demand from people desperate for your app. And in many ways, that has worked out well for Seesaw, a San Francisco company. The number of student posts on its app increased tenfold from February to May, Seesaw says, and the paid customer base has tripled from last year. The app is now used in more than three-quarters of American schools, including big districts like Dallas and Los Angeles.[…] But Seesaw’s experience also shows the kinds of hurdles that a company must jump in such extreme circumstances, going through years’ worth of growing pains in a few months. Other digital education products, like Zoom and Google Classroom, experienced similar growth spurts and ran into their own problems — such as unwelcome strangers who dropped into those early weeks of Zoom school. But they are public companies with resources to spare. Seesaw had just 60 employees in February, when the coronavirus hit the United States, and was trying to prove that it deserved a tryout for the big leagues. Small issues that the company knew about but hadn’t addressed before the pandemic became significant problems. Teachers begged for app reliability, but some changes Seesaw made for at-home use didn’t always work smoothly. While Seesaw executives wanted the app to be interesting for students, it had to be streamlined enough for frazzled parents suddenly running at-home school.read more

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