Association News

SETDA Recognizes New Cohort of Promising Ed Tech Startups

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 07/18/19

SETDA, the State Educational Technology Directors Association, announced its seventh annual cohort of "emerging private sector partners," start-ups that the organization believes state and district technical education leaders ought to learn more about. Those companies accepted into the program (and pay a fee to participate in) produce products or services that leverage technology to serve a need in pre-K-12 education or pre-service training, are scalable up to the state level and have been around at least one year but no more than five years.

This year's cohort includes five companies:

• 2gnoMe, which develops a content-agnostic platform for personalizing educator professional development;

• CoderZ, an online learning environment for helping students in grades 6-12 learn coding with virtual robots;

• Padcaster, which has programs to help students with video and podcasting work, including Parrot, which turns a smartphone into a teleprompter; and Verse, which allows the user to shoot, edit and share video from a smartphone;

• TechTrep, which has developed an environment that lets a city, town or region make STEM lessons available to elementary and middle school students for classroom, afterschool and weekend programs; and

• WURRLYedu, which offers lesson plans and tools for music education.

Through their participation in the emerging partners program, the companies will have in-person and virtual opportunities to interact with education leaders.

"These partners will help our state leaders to understand the newest ed tech innovations in ways that directly support our mission to improve education through technology policy and practice," said Candice Dodson, executive director of SETDA, in a statement.