Open petergault opened 9 years ago
Minute 2 How we solve this problem:
Hello,
My name is Peter Gault, and I am the Executive Director of Quill.org. We’re empowering people to write their own stories.
I’d like to introduce you to Kiera and Olivia. They are 11 and 12 years old, and they are some of the first students to play Quill Writer.
They got so into writing their story that while the Olivia was writing her part of the story, Kiera was nagging her to “finish already” so that she could go. We’re pilot testing Quill Writer right now, and kids love being able to write and learn together.
The problem that edtech faces today is there are very few tools that enable students to write. There are many video based and multiple choice based activities.
These are not engaging because they are passive learning experiences. Let’s get kids actively involved in the learning process by getting them writing.
In my own education, writing out an idea into an essay is when the idea came together. I studied philosophy and history in school, and it was when I wrote an essay, and put it into my own words, that the idea came together.
I participated in parliamentary debate for eight years, which was the single best educational experience of my life. Those debates challenged me to construct my own arguments.
I’ve been working on Quill for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the past 2 years because I want to get people actively involved in the writing process - getting them to construct their own ideas and challenge one another. I was fortunate enough to attend schools that made learning meaningful. However, I also had many elementary school friends who ended up in uninspired schools were learning was a chore. They ended up hating school because it consisted of sitting in a chair being lectured to all day.
At the same time, these friends love games because they are actively involved in the process. My background is in educational games, and I recognized at an early on that video games are going to revolutionize education because they get students actively engaged in the learning process.
I’ve been working on this night and day not only because I want people to love learning but also because there are big problems that we need to solve. Our generation faces challenges from global warming and income inequality, and the first step to solving those problems is giving each person a voice so that he or she can express his or her own opinions.
Learning how to write well not only makes you a better writer, it also makes you a better thinker. It allows you to structure your ideas and defend them.
Right now our mission is focused on teaching the basic aspects of writing - grammar and vocabulary.
In the next 2-3 years we will get into more advanced components of writing such as essay writing and peer review.
In the next 5 years we will open up our platform to apps, games, and tools that teach all types of subjects, with a focus on learning by writing and actively constructing your own ideas.
We have an expensive vision and there is no way we can solve it alone. A core part of our DNA is to build a massive community. There are thousands of educators out there who have great ideas & want to share them. There are also thousands of developers who want to build their open source portfolios.
We can bring these two communities together and let the collaboration happen. We have had over 100 people contribute to Quill so far, with teachers creating activities and developers improving the code.
Our vision it organize all of these people into teams. The problem with many open source organizations, such as Wikipedia, is that it can be difficult for new people to get involved. Our vision is to organize people into small teams of 7-20 people a piece. New contributors can form their own teams and small teams can request new contributors.
Here you can see the six teams we are launching with.
Over time we will build hundreds of teams. Our vision is not to be a single massive cruise ship, but rather to be hundreds of speedboats, each one zipping around and quickly and agile creating positive learning experiences.
In sum, the Quill vision is components of three central parts:
A community that collaborates and questions the status quo.
A series of tools, apps, and games that engages students in the learning process.
And a platform that pulls all of these tools together into a seamless learning experience and which measures success.
This should be snappy - one sentence for each of these points. - Right now / With Quill; Right Now / With Quill
How we change the game. It goes from paper to instant feedback.
How we change the game:
Laser focused on writing - basic aspects, advanced aspects, all subjects.
How you can get in on the action - our schools, our funders to date.
Based on this feedback, let's develop a new version of the mission video:
https://docs.google.com/a/quill.org/document/d/1HgSZprgHju--Aaef_za1wDnTgpfAi604baHmO9OsGKg/edit