Skip to main content

To Our Founding Teachers


TLDR: During Teacher Appreciation Month, May 2020, teachers can be recognized as Floop Founding Teachers and receive 50% off Floop prices for life. To join, contribute to our summer fund, or show your support for another teacher. [Update June 1, 2020 - Our campaign has ended. Thank you to all our new Founding Teachers for your support!]

Looking back on the last 3 years, I am humbled by how far Floop has come. When I attended a startup hackathon lugging my 150-quiz paper stack, I was only trying to figure out a way to give my students meaningful feedback faster. Then I met Christine Witcher, a middle school STEM teacher who became my co-founder. Christine taught me about effective peer feedback and how to shift agency to students. We dove into the research, talked with feedback experts, and learned about feedback literacy, the crucial life skills around giving, receiving, and using feedback to learn. That led us to incorporating intentional feedback engagement into our platform and creating Floop’s feedback literacy toolkit.

Christine and I have continued to teach remotely during our school closures while building new Floop features.

Floop as a company goes beyond appreciating teachers. Teacher voice is a part of our DNA. Floop was founded by current teachers and every decision we’ve made is based on feedback from teachers and students.

Our promise to all of our educators, students, and parents who support us - Floop will always be a platform that evolves based on the input of teachers and research. We are always going to work to make Floop better, by adding the features you want and sharing feedback lessons that matter.

During this Teacher Appreciation Month and this crazy time of school, we want to recognize you as Floop Founding Teachers, as well as continue to ask for your support. Christine and I consider ourselves Founding Teachers - we use Floop with our own students and they’ve even helped with some of the website design. We also consider all of you to be Founding Teachers, with your feedback and support.

Being a Floop Founding Teacher has perks:
  • 50% off Floop. While Floop has been free to use so far, we need to start charging so we can support our team (more on that below). Floop will be a paid product starting next school year, but you will be guaranteed 50% off, exclusive for Founding Teachers.
  • Early access to new Floop features and resources. We’ll continue to build the features and tools you want, and you will be the first to try them.
  • Opt-in to company updates. These are updates that we send not to our users but to other stakeholders - investors, mentors, advisors, and hopefully you!
  • Recognition badge and title. Display #FloopFoundingTeacher and your Founding Teacher Badge on your Twitter or other social media accounts proudly.

To be recognized as a Founding Teacher, we have a big ask for you:

Please show your support now by contributing to our summer fund.

So far, our tiny Floop team has been working for free. Nobody has taken a paycheck since the company started. But, the demands of the company have been growing (our user base has tripled in the last two months!). One of our developers will be working full time over this summer to stabilize and improve the app. While Christine and I will stay in the classroom next year, we want to be able to support our other team members moving forward, especially in this uncertain economy. For as little as $5, you can help us ensure that Floop is around to support teachers for years to come.

Thank you, @MrsPfleegor! We agree that we deserve a raise!
If you contribute between now and May 31, you will be an official Floop Founding Teacher and get 50% off Floop. Please email [email protected] with any questions about this process.

Not a current Floop teacher but want to show your support? You can contribute on behalf of a teacher or directly to the company. Your contribution will make this teacher eligible for our Floop Founding Teacher program.

Contributions will be used for:
  • The teacher’s subscription cost for the 2020-21 school year
  • Floop summer development fund (supporting our team and tech infrastructure)
  • Subscription scholarships for teachers who cannot afford them (including our thousands of teachers around the world)
Over 50% of Floop's users are from outside the U.S. We have already heard from some of our international teachers that they cannot afford the subscription prices of U.S.-based tools. Your support will help students everywhere have access to meaningful feedback. 

Thank you so much, Teachers, for your resilience during these hard times and for your continued support of Floop. We hope to be able to officially call you Floop Founding Teachers soon!

Best,
Melanie Kong
Floop CEO and Co-Founder
High School STEM Teacher

Comments

  1. A_PowysSeptember 1, 2020 at 3:53 AM

    Hi Melanie/Christine,
    I hope you had some rest during the summer break ;-)
    I had a question: I have seen the Referral code on my profile; but, how do I send this in an email to a fellow teacher? Do you have a template email for that?
    Many thanks for Floop & all your work - I want to share the news with my colleagues!
    With kind regards,
    Andrew

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Melanie KongSeptember 1, 2020 at 7:43 AM

      Hi Andrew, thanks for your question! We don't have a way to send the code through the app, but you can copy-paste the code in a separate email to send. Here's a blurb that you can use:

      Based on research and built by teachers, Floop is a web app that helps teachers give meaningful feedback faster and empowers students with lifelong feedback literacy. Floop allows teachers to collect images, PDFs, and Google Docs from students, and then leave text and audio comments that lead to conversations. Students give each other feedback and build their feedback skills through Floop's guided peer review. Coming soon: Freeform comments!

      Sign up at www.floopedu.com with referral code [CODE] for $10 off your subscription.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back-to-School: Consider Your Feedback System, Not Grading System

One question I ask other teachers is “How important is feedback in learning?” Every teacher I talk to agrees that feedback is crucial. It’s how both teacher and student gets better. Research backs the importance of feedback; building off of John Hattie’s work comparing factors on learning, Evidence for Learning’s toolkit ranks feedback as having the highest impact out of their 34 approaches (along with meta-cognition) with a +8 months’ impact on students’ learning progress. I follow the feedback question with “How important are grades in learning?” It might seem like a loaded question. You can imagine how teachers respond: “They’re not.” Why give grades, then? We’ll save that topic for another occasion. For now, I just want to point out that we are frequently asked to consider and describe our grading system by students, parents, colleagues, and administrators. We’re rarely asked about the much bigger and more important component of our work: feedback. With back-to-school qu
4 comments
Read more

A Culture of Iteration: Policies and Practices for a Revision-FocusedClassroom

Success in the real world depends on a person's ability to iterate. to understand the definition of success on a task to seek feedback early and often to use that feedback to revise and refine until successful As teachers, its our job to scaffold this process, with developmentally-appropriate differentiation, until our students can fly solo. As I sit here writing this, my  SO  Dan is at his desk  red-lining  a building diagram for a warehouse in Canada. When he's done, the diagram will go back to his team of engineers where they will respond to Dan's feedback with a better design. They'll repeat this process until both building code and client requirements have been met. To do this work, which requires an iteration cycle that can last over a year or more, Dan has to understand building code and client needs, seek feedback from other engineers and the client, and use that feedback to revise and refine until the design is ready for implementation. ​Dan wasn'
4 comments
Read more

Part 2 - Tools for an Equitable Feedback System: Engaging with Criteria

This series of posts will cover a variety of bite-sized strategies that can be incorporated into a more holistic feedback system. To learn more about the research behind these approaches, we recommend you first read our white paper . Part 1 - Feedback is Emotional For feedback information to be useful, it must communicate:  Where am I going? (What are the goals?) How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?) Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?) (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).  Supporting students in engaging with the grading criteria helps give context to the feedback to come. In other words, it does the groundwork of helping them determine for themselves, "Where am I going?"
Post a Comment
Read more