1027. His EdTech Company Gives Teachers a Greater Ability to Focus on Student Learning

“As a seventh and eight grade social studies teacher, I really enjoyed the ability to connect with kids at such a transformative age. When I started my first job, I thought it would be all about the teaching. I thought the hard part was going to be the ability to connect with the kids and create lesson plans and scope and sequence. But what I quickly realized was, of all the things that are asked of teachers, it’s the administrative tasks that really began to weigh on me. I had 150 kids. I was trying to do all of these things to help them. I really wanted to be able to have an understanding of who every kid was. I wanted to know: What are their passions? What are their interests? What is their current level of reading and writing? What is their ability to think critically and independently? And I would make these cheat sheets so I could remember things such as, I had this student last year, I had this person’s brother as a student, this person is into soccer, this person likes …, etc. I would try to know these things so that I could connect with the kids. But it turned out the connection part was actually not as difficult–for me at least. It was all of the administrative tasks. They wanted so much information, like you have to track this, you have to submit that to the secretary, and so forth. There had to be a way to become more efficient in all of this. And that’s actually the story that brings us to the start of “Otus” and my work with a colleague to use technology as a tool to help us and other teachers do the job at hand better than we could do by ourselves.”

Chris Hull is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Otus, a Chicago-based edtech company. After 13 years as an educator, Chris wanted to minimize the chaos of disconnected edtech tools for K-12 administrators, educators, students, and their families. Otus is one system to teach, grade, analyze, and plan. With Otus, school leaders can focus on student learning, not technology.