Show HN: We allow teachers to print out "Scantrons" and scan for results via fax

Given that "Powerful analytics" tells most teachers "You're on the wrong website", I might have skipped that sentence and gone directly to the problem which they actually care about that you purport to solve.<p>n.b. I love the idea of launching a new Heroku instance for demo accounts... though one questions why Heroku would let you do that. You should probably rethink that interaction design, though. "Setup Demo" suggests a lot of work -- unify the two steps into one and then give it a call-to-action that suggests a low-friction experience. I don't know, "See It In Action" or something. Similarly, virtually anything beats "Create New Account."<p>As always, please test confident statements I make regarding relative conversion rates. I do, because I flub guesses all the time.

I ended up showing the website to my wife (a former K-12 Teacher with a special ed/restraint endorsement in the Commonwealth of Kentucky), who is now working on her Doctorate in Education.<p>Her initial reaction was, "think of how much this is going to save the schools in budget and in time!", followed by "I wonder how much this is going to cost a district." Locally, the schools here are spending less than 10K/year on software for teachers, and that amount gets cut back a little bit each year: Teachers are frequently purchasing (or pirating) software for use in their classroom when they find software that has educational or productive merit. Your biggest hurdle will probably be getting the price points set correctly...but with that said...the wife loves it and went to show it off to a few of her friends who are still in the public educational system here who claimed it was, 'neat' and even a self-admitted technophobe mentioned that it looked better than the system that they're currently using.<p>Good job and great work -- this has a lot of potential to be a gamechanger for teachers.

This is one of the most interesting companies I've seen posted on HN in a while. Good luck achieving market penetration.<p>I'd put up a pdf of a generated assignment that can be scan/fax graded online right away in an easy to access fashion. That is what I most wanted to take a look at, and it looks like the demo won't render the document.<p>Do you put a QR code on each assignment to uniquely identify a student? So papers have to be handed out precisely to each student? Or do you have students bubble in names/identification numbers?<p>How are you going to handle the kind of problems that would be created by using this technology in a class of &#60;8th graders? Crumpled/dog eared papers, intentional attempts to make forms hard to computer read. Have you thought about linking to Amazon's Mechanical Turk to have human grading of difficult to parse entries?<p>Is your product going to be crushed by computers/tablets for every student in future classroom environments? If assignments are all digital (i.e some college textbook environments like 'Mastering Physics') the scan to grade edge slips out. Especially when providers can offer prewritten educational material questions/exams/content as part of their platform.

You know, I saw when this website was posted earlier.<p>I think it's awesome you provide both faxing and scanning interfaces.<p>I had two questions: 1. Where are you based? Why don't you have a snail mail address on your website? It's not even clear you are based in the U.S.<p>2. On a more stat based note: When you analyze the data, are you merely analyzing the students, or are you providing IRT analysis for the test questions themselves? Do you provide support for A/B testing of test types, or dynamic testing in your online interface?<p>Because to me, those are things your average teacher can't do, but knowing how well each question and each test assesses students modeled as a function of student ability means that your assessments aren't just easier, but can be made better at measuring ability.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_response_theory" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_response_theory</a>

Push the scantron-less grading. That's your biggest selling point, hands down. A pack of 500 forms (see link below) retails for $60; you'd be saving school districts literally tens of thousands of dollars per year.<p><a href="https://store.scantron.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?section=10700&#38;item=42622&#38;sitex=10022:22372:US" rel="nofollow">https://store.scantron.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?sect...</a><p>Also, I can't seem to get my PDFs to generate. Anyone else experiencing this?

What are the privacy implications of a teacher giving students' grade information to a third party? I was under the impression the law (in US) required a parent's release.  Is it possible for your admins to view grade data?

Neat concept and a well designed site, I hope you guys get some market penetration as I'm sure this would be a huge burden relief for teachers everywhere.<p>A few suggestions: If I were you I'd make the login button stand out more by having the orange rectangle always visible. Teachers aren't the most tech savvy bunch, and having the login button blend in as much as it does currently will probably confuse/frustrate alot of them.<p>Also, its probably best to refrain from using the word "Scantron." Its a registered trademark of Scantron Corporation, and as they're technologically WAY behind you guys, their probably going to get pretty trigger-happy with litigation if they see their monopoly threatened.

Just curious: have you actually talked to many teachers? Shown them the site and asked for feedback?<p>I feel like your landing page is way off from what a teacher would be expecting. Don't get me wrong, _I_ like it, but that doesn't mean it converts well with your target market.

Wow. Two in one week. Just a few days ago I came across: <a href="http://www.gradecam.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gradecam.com/</a> which does something very similar but with document cameras rather than fax machines.<p><i>It's great to see tools like these being built for those outside the tech bubble.</i>

This is exciting!<p>Do you plan to offer API support? I would be very interested in having students fax the exam sheet to Kite, and then pulling the question marks (and image?) from your service.<p>Also, will educators have to use your exam sheets?<p>Can you read barcodes?

Agree with the previous sentiment-this seems geared towards showcasing a cool tech demo rather than the teachers themselves. Put the scrantron scanning upfront, as that's the main draw and detail the painless process to do it.

Would students in the class be able to login and see their grades? It would be awesome to integrate this with LMS platforms like Blackboard.

Really curious as to how you're implementing the fax feature. Is it an in-house solution, or are you guys using somebody's API?

The UI on your home page is terrific! So well designed... did you do that in-house or contract it out?

Most modern copiers offer scan-and-email functionality. This might be much simpler than faxing.

This is a beautifully designed site. I absolutely love the sliding signup/sign in sheets.

Instead of faxing have you guys thought about OCR via a webcam/mobile phone/scanner?

i looked at the source code, all seems so very nicely done. can u shed some light on the underlying technology? i see you use some twitter bootstrap, but the ui elements look like your own (i like) and backbone right?