Pear Deck accepted to ed-tech competition, plans expanded roll out

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After incorporating in January and launching a closed beta in March, Iowa City education startup Pear Deck is ready to take a national stage and roll out to educators nationwide.

The startup will travel to Philadelphia on May 13-14 to compete in the Milken-Penn business plan competition, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education and the Milken Family Foundation, which focuses on education and health innovation. Pear Deck was one of 12 companies nationally selected to compete.

Meanwhile, co-founders are gradually granting access to their 1,500-member waiting list.

Pear Deck is a tool that lets K-12 teachers create interactive lessons for their classrooms. Teachers can quiz students to see how well they are understanding the material in real time.

The company was founded by serial Iowa City entrepreneurs Michal Eynon-Lynch, Riley Eynon-Lynch and Dan Sweeney, and Anthony Showalter, who is based near New York City.

"What's exciting about this platform is there's no fear," said Michal, a former teacher herself. "The teacher is able to see what every student is thinking, where before she would only hear from those students who raised their hands a lot."

Pear Deck is built on Google Apps for Education, a platform used by millions of students worldwide. The program lives inside of Google Drive, and students log in with their Google account. Pear Deck is optimized for Google's cloud-based Chromebook devices, as more schools move to a 1:1 student:device ratio, but it can be used in any system where students and teachers have Google accounts. (Google itself claims that one in five school districts are using Chromebooks.)

"Schools know they can't afford not to have computers available to students," Eynon-Lynch said. "There aren't that many apps that are optimized for Chromebooks and the cloud space yet."

Pear Deck has been in a closed beta test in 12 schools, and has gathered a waiting list of nearly 1,500 teachers, school administers, technology consultants and education agencies who want to try the platform. Teachers will be able to use Pear Deck on a freemium model and purchase pre-made lesson plans, or school districts can purchase a yearly subscription, with the cost based on the number of students.

The founders hope that teacher excitement can drive entire school districts to the platform.

"It's relatively easy to get teachers excited about something, but teachers don't have a lot of money - it's hard to charge them," Eynon-Lynch said. "At the same time, it's hard to work through a school district to roll out a whole program before teachers are excited about it."

The three Iowa City co-founders previously launched and sold ActiveGrade, an online gradebook for teachers to better measure students' learning. They met Showalter, the fourth co-founder, through the company that acquired ActiveGrade.

Lessons learned from ActiveGrade have helped tremendously with Pear Deck, Eynon-Lynch said.

"Where we were four months into ActiveGrade was so completely different," she said. "It's really exciting to realize we've learned all that because of this ecosystem that's growing here."