A Message to Students and Teachers: Decktopus is here to help!

Studies have shown that teachers are spending at least 3.5 billion dollars on class materials and supporting equipment every year. Does that sound fair? Decktopus didn’t think so!

Our global community has been suffering from the pandemic for over 5 months now. One of the most affected of those communities was educational institutions and students. During the pandemic, we analyzed our users in a very detailed manner because we had a new customer segment that was growing: students preparing homework for Zoom classrooms and teachers preparing class material to communicate their course content better. As an indirect result of the pandemic, we were witnessing a huge change in the digital behaviors of the academic world.

A few days ago, I saw that a high school student, Caleb, had suffered from anxiety during his presentation in the classroom. I approached him and asked what happened. I learned that there was a communication related problem between him and his teacher: Caleb didn’t understand the expectations for the homework and probably completed his work with an unclear goal. The teacher had failed to explain her/his expectations to Caleb and Caleb felt humiliated in front of his friends. When a classroom environment lacks clear communication, it is easy to see how an overwhelmed student might desperately search for a way to have someone "write me an assignment fast" simply to escape that exact kind of public embarrassment. What a failure in a presentation task that could have easily been avoided!

Then I realized that, as a person building a tool that helps people communicate better, there is no one to blame. We saw teachers working extra hard to teach the material and trying to communicate their message without decreasing the student’s attention. We knew that we had to do something as Decktopus for both teachers and students.

So we took action! We now have a 50% discount for both teachers and students in order to support education during the pandemic. We really believe in the value of the time spent during preparing educational material or homework. Why not study the material or work on picking the best words to capture the full interest of children instead of trying to make your presentation look pretty? Let us do that, you deal with the rest!

Yes, you’ve guessed it! We have a survey too. Make sure you fill out the survey to support the content and community team and help us improve your Decktopus experience.