Gimkit Monthly Update - April 2020

It's been a few months since we've done our monthly update, but with everything going on, it feels like a few years.

A lot has happened since our January update:

For more details here's our monthly update video:

Thank you for watching and for everything you're doing for your students. Take care of yourselves out there!

Extension for Gimkit Pro Members Impacted by School Closures

EDIT: Since the school year has ended, we are not allowing any new extensions as of July 1st.

Less than a week ago we launched support for educators using the free version of Gimkit.

At the time, the move seemed like a good step toward supporting educators impacted by the coronavirus and COVID-19. But then Friday happened and school closures were expanded and extended all across the country.

As of now, 37 states have shut down K-12 schools entirely and over 32 million students have had school canceled. Some schools and districts are able to continue instruction remotely, while others are halted completely.

Things are moving quickly.

Large groups of educators are no longer doing instruction of any kind (remote or otherwise) and will not be using Gimkit for at least the next several months.

So, in addition to the option to increase the Kit limit for free members, we've added some relief for Gimkit Pro members.

We're providing a 4-month extension for all Gimkit Pro members.

Just log into your account and click the "Impacted by COVID-19" button in the left-hand panel from your dashboard to get an extra 4 months on your subscription.

We made accessing this extension as easy as possible. Two clicks, no questions asked.

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For technical reasons, we had to build this for Gimkit Pro members on individual subscriptions paying via credit card only.

If you manage a Gimkit Group Subscription or are a Gimkit Pro Pass or Go member and your school has been canceled, please email us at hello@gimkit.com and we'll be happy to help you out.

It's been an unprecedented last few weeks. With everything that's happening and all of the chaos, we're grateful for you and your dedication to education and your students. Fadi, Josh, and I wish you all the best as we all navigate this together.

Support for Educators Impacted by COVID-19

Edit: As the school year has ended, we are not increasing Kit limits as of July 1st.

The ongoing global impact of COVID-19 is on everyone's minds, for good reason.

Here in Washington, there's been a mix of reactions, ranging from confusion to panic to frustration, at the disruption of regular life. And we understand all of it.

It's been interesting to observe things on a local level while also hearing from so many of you about how things are going around you.

Over the past several days we've received emails from all over the world asking about support for educators who have been impacted by COVID 19.

We haven't had a good answer so we patched together free trials of Gimkit Pro and expanded Kit limits here and there. But, as more educators search for remote solutions, we felt like it was important to find a way to provide simpler, more convenient support.

So, for educators on Gimkit Basic impacted by COVID-19, we're doubling our Kit limit so you can create more Kits as you get started with Gimkit or find yourself using it more in a remote environment.

No info needed. No questions asked. Just go to your account dashboard and click the button at bottom left.

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As always, we're here for you if you have any questions at hello@gimkit.com.

Some things I'm proud of...

I'm not a naturally secure or confident person, especially when it comes to my work. I've never been good at talking about projects I'm working on or blustering about my job. When aunts and uncles ask about my job over the holidays I generally stammer and deliver boring, largely non-sensical answers.

For some reason, I even struggle to talk about Gimkit with confidence. And that’s something I'm incredibly proud of.

In an attempt to tackle my insecurities and highlight some of Gimkit's coolest developments over the past year, I've put together this post. I'm genuinely proud of how far we've come in the past 12 months and I'm excited to shine a light on some of the things we've accomplished, with the support from our incredible community, in that span.

Flagged Kits & community safety improvements

Less than a month after I started working on Gimkit full-time we received an email from a teacher with a problem. This teacher's problem was more significant and nuanced than the typical technical question I'd received up to that point:

While using Gimkit, this teacher's students had come across a hurtful racial slur that applied to him and then showed him.

The problem, of course, wasn't that this teacher and their students found the hurtful language, it was that it was on Gimkit at all. Understandably, this teacher was shocked, disappointed, and hurt.

After exchanging several emails with this teacher, Josh and I developed a two-tier plan to help make Gimkit a safer, healthier community.

First, we created a list of inappropriate and offensive words that are automatically blocked from showing up in Kits and in live games. That list wasn't perfect and it didn't totally irradiate the problem, but it was a good initial step. Here's what that feature looks like inside of Gimkit:

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Even with this update students and teachers can still come across offensive and hurtful content even with starred out words. We knew as we created it that the "bad-word" fix was a band-aid for a much larger problem.

It took some more time and technical work, but when we launched Gimkit 4.0 in late September, it came with a new tool for Flagging Kits. Just as anyone with a Gimkit account can make a Kit inside of Gimkit, anyone with an account could flag any Kit inside of Gimkt.

Flagging a Kit gives the reporter a few options that help categorize the Kits for review, as well as the option to leave a note, which is always helpful.

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I now review flagged Kits every week, happy to help the teachers and students who reported them in making Gimkit a safer, more welcoming environment. Since we launched Kit flagging, the Gimkit community has helped identify over 500 Kits as offensive/inappropriate or inaccurate/misleading.

I also use the Kit-flagging system to routinely scrape Gimkit for Kits with particularly offensive and hurtful words and phrases. At least once a month I pick a few words and use the Kit Flagging system to flag and remove Kits that are harmful to our community.

There are a lot of terrible words that would've brought up dozens of Kits if you'd searched Gimkit for a year ago. Now, searching those words brings up nothing. And if something does pop up, you can flag it and we'll review it and take the appropriate steps to remove it from the community.

A simple word filter and a system for Flagging Kits aren't the biggest achievements in EdTech history (all of the other review games and most classroom tools have similar features). But they helped make Gimkit a safer, more inclusive place and I'm proud of them.

Privacy Policy

Another item that popped up on my radar as soon as I started at Gimkit, helping to re-write Gimkit's Privacy Policy is one of the achievements I'm most proud of for my entire career.

The Gimkit Privacy Policy in January 2019 was the same template-policy Josh launched Gimkit with in late October, 2017. Worse than being outdated, the Privacy Policy was a genuine problem. Gimkit had outgrown it and it wasn’t enough to adequately protect the thousands of teachers and educators using Gimkit. As a result, many schools and districts were blocking use of Gimkit.

Updating our Privacy Policy slowly became my main focus, especially after the 2019 school year ended. At the time, I didn’t know anything about writing a Privacy Policy for an EdTech company. The task didn’t only feel daunting, it felt nearly impossible. Luckily, there are many good examples in EdTech of amazing Privacy Policies (especially EdPuzzle and Pear Deck) that I was able to study and learn from. Luckier still, we started making friends with a few of the EdTech vets we respected who were happy to help guide me as I re-worked our Privacy Policy.

Reading other Privacy Policies and asking obnoxious questions of busy CEOs and COOs wouldn’t be enough. We also found an attorney, Madhu Singh, who had experience working with EdTech companies. Without Madhu, I wouldn’t have been able to get through the Privacy Policy work!

Thinking back on where our Privacy Policy was a year ago compared to where it is now makes me proud, not only because of the work I put in but also because of the policy itself. It would’ve been easy to create an updated Privacy Policy that was “good enough.” But that never occurred to Josh and I, even in the third and fourth and fifth months of the process.

I know it’ll need to evolve again soon to fit rapidly changing laws and expectations around student privacy and to accommodate product updates, but, as I re-read it now, I can’t help but feel proud of how we’ve planted our flag in regards to privacy.

Groups

I've already written an entire blog post on this, so I'll keep this section brief.

At the end of January 2020 we released one of the most exciting developments of my time here - a simple, teacher and admin-friendly Group Subscription system.

Josh worked hard to make something that's excessively uncomplicated and easy to use. I'm really proud of what he made, even though I had little to do with the development and physical creation of it. I'm proud of the time, effort, and care he put into it because the result is pretty amazing.

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Educators and Admins can now get a quote, use a credit card or Purchase Order to pay for their group, and start distributing upgrades in five minutes or less. Obviously most Groups will need several days to get approval on the quote and have a PO created, but our Groups system puts everything in one place and removes all unnecessary friction for schools and teachers, including sales calls, long forms, and PO verification.

Our old system grew with the demand for Group Subscriptions and was bloated, complicated, and frustrating as a result. Our new system, in contrast, makes purchasing Gimkit for a Group with a PO the easiest product to purchase for a group in all of EdTech.

Feedback center

I had nothing to do with creating our Feedback Center, but I'm proud of it nonetheless.

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We use this page to collect and analyze product suggestions from our community. Once we have those suggestions, we use them to develop new features and make updates to Gimkit.

We launched our suggestions page around the middle of November 2019 and we now have over 700 product suggestions. We've added several of these suggestions to Gimkit and have a few currently in progress - all of which you can see here on the page's automatically generated roadmap.

I'm proud of our suggestions page because with it we're not only saying that we're building Gimkit for educators and students, we're backing it up in a public and visible way.

Pear Deck integration

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Our integration with Pear Deck's Flashcard Factory is another one I'm proud of even though I didn't have much to do with the actual feature or physical creation. Josh did all of the API work and communication with Pear Deck on the tech side. Before that, the seeds for our partnership with Pear Deck were sown when Anthony Showalter reached out to us in April of last year.

But, over time, Josh and I built a relationship with Anthony that led to a great conversation at ISTE 2019. At that point we all agreed that it would be awesome to work together in some way but it would be best to wait for something natural rather than force something. After all, Pear Deck and Gimkit exist to support teachers and students, not so that we can build cool stuff for the heck of it.

Luckily, we didn't have to wait long for the opportunity to build something cool that also held real purpose and value for classrooms. We started talking seriously with Anthony, Riley, and Kate at Pear Deck about an integration with Flashcard Factory in the fall and that integration launched early December.

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I'm proud of the relationship we've forged with Pear Deck (a company we truly admire) and the work we've done with them to make teaching and learning a little more engaging and effective.

Remote working

We've been talking about our company's transition to working remote a lot lately, so I'll keep this brief and just say that Josh has been the catalyst for this shift and I'm proud of all three of us for discussing, deliberating, and (ultimately) taking the leap. A big change like this is scary for a new, tiny company but I think it was the right call for how we work.

I'm proud of us for trying something we think will improve the company and the lives of its employees. But I'm even more proud that we lived up to one of our core values:

Experimentation before perfection

Quick and dirty ideas that are publicly shared and validated before investing time and resources on a perfect version.

In February alone I saved 15 hours of commute time since I didn't' have to ride the bus to our south-downtown office. Not only is my 15-minute walk to work much nicer than the 45-minute early-morning bus ride, but all three of us also did some of our best, most efficient work in February because of the additional rest and personal time we filled in that commuting time with.

We're currently hiring for a fourth person to join our team, which makes the realities of being a newly-remote company even scarier. But fear is just fear. We can always find an office again if this experiment doesn't work. We likely won't regret trying out remote working, but as we talked about the numerous benefits (for the company and its employees) it became clear to us all that we'd likely regret not trying it.

It's cool to look back at the last 12 months and say "Wow, none of this existed a year ago!"

Seeing everything laid out like this makes me even more proud to be a part of Gimkit. I feel a sense of gratitude to get to wake up every day and work on this project with Fadi and Josh.

If nothing else, maybe writing this piece will help me look my aunts and uncles in the eyes when they ask me about my job at Easter! 😎

Gimkit Gazette - January 2020

We’ve been making monthly update videos (we call them Gazettes) since last May, but it just occurred to us to post them here. 🤦‍♂️

We’ve got a double-dose for you this month!

This Gimkit covers everything from December & January, and a lot happened:

  • The Winter Event

  • Josh's work on connection issues,

  • Our partnership with Pear Deck

  • Our move to working remotely

  • And so much more!

Here’s what we've been up to:

Gimkit for Groups

Josh started accepting group subscriptions back in the summer of 2018, keeping track of everything in a spreadsheet.

Since those early days, hundreds of groups have purchased Gimkit subscriptions covering thousands of educators. We love this because more groups means fewer educators are paying for Gimkit out of pocket.

We've tried to keep up with the growing demand using a slightly evolved version of Josh's initial system. We've done an OK job, but not a great one. It's still way too complicated and time-consuming to get a Gimkit group subscription up and running.

That's why we're excited to introduce a brand new and incredibly easy way to purchase group subscriptions. We're calling it Groups (because we're great at naming things!) and it's launching today.

Everything that's annoying about purchasing school EdTech licenses is gone:

Long quote forms asking a million pieces of personal information.

We just need the name of your group so we know who to make the quote out to and your email so we can send over a copy.

Waiting for a quote to arrive in your inbox.

Click "Submit" and get a quote...instantly.

Sales calls.

We're here to help you learn more if you need it, not to try to up-sell you on anything.

Hidden pricing.

We have two prices. That's it. Both are listed on our site. You don't have be a good negotiator to get our best price.

Price increases with more teachers.

Subscribe to our School plan and the price doesn't change - it doesn't matter if 30 teachers are using it or 120.

Everything you need to do with Groups happens online, right away. You can get your quote, access help desk articles and our W-9, upload your PO or pay with a credit card, and begin managing your subscription all in one place.

Groups is the first system we know of where you can purchase for your group with a purchase order without needing to contact us, talk to a person, or have some kind of communication exchange.

Groups has just two levels: Department and School. That's it.

  • Department - Gimkit Pro for 20 teachers for a year - $650

  • School - Gimkit Pro for your entire school - $1,000

Both plans offer huge savings over purchasing individual subscriptions of Gimkit Pro. Again, without any negotiating, hassle, or unnecessary back-and-forth.

A lot of the extra stuff you spend time on when purchasing a site or software license is designed for the benefit of the company you're buying from rather than with the goal of saving you time. In short, we took away all of the stuff that was bogging the process down, leaving only the things we thought would make your life easier.

We mean it when we say we want Gimkit to be paid by schools, not educators. Typically, paying for a school subscription has many barriers. Today, we're getting rid of them.