Editor’s note: ExitEvent, a news partner of WRAL TechWire, profiles the six recipients of the latest NC IDEA Fund grants. The first is Lea(R)n. Profiles were written by ExitEvent Editor Laura Baverman.
DURHAM, N.C. – If you thought that the field of education was slow to change, then you likely haven’t counted the number of educational applications out there these days.
According to Lea(R)n co-founder Karl Rectanus, there are 20,000 applications doing everything from organizing digital content to gamifying classroom learning to delivering education in new ways to evaluating teachers and staff. Any given teacher or administrator is testing out three or four technology tools at a given time, he says. And to date, there’s no real way to know which platform works better than any other.
Rectanus believes he’s the best person to create a system of evaluating and certifying EdTech. He spent time early in his career as a teaching fellow in North Carolina, and then left to become the third employee at eCivis, a Washington D.C. startup helping schools manage their grant applications. He helped grow it to $20 million in sales before coming back to North Carolina in 2007 to help found NC STEM. He’s consulted with the White House, state legislators, the Gates Foundation and other entities around education innovation.
The complete profile can be read at ExitEvent.
