Reasons why teachers turn into the best entrepreneurs? Teachers are an invaluable and integral part of our community. They contribute a great deal of knowledge from elementary school and beyond to help mold us into the people we are today. Teachers are tasked with preparing today’s students to become next-generation thinkers, leaders, and entrepreneurs to shape tomorrow’s world. With such an important role to play in children’s lives, a teacher must have a unique way of supporting their students’ academic and social development throughout their schooling. They should offer them a comfortable and secure learning environment by being a mentor, guide, motivator, and a source of inspiration to them. Nowadays many teachers leave their jobs to pursue more lucrative careers. More than one-third of teachers quit within a few years of joining their profession. Some teachers choose to stay in the educational field but in a more unique way. Sometimes they become educational entrepreneurs by providing a spotlight to enhance the way education happens. Teachers who often become EdTech entrepreneurs are very successful and that’s why teachers make some of the best EdTech entrepreneurs. Tips for entrepreneurial teachers to create their educational app: It is essential that mobile apps be developed with precision starting from their ideation to deployment to ensure its success post-launch. As a teacher, it is essential to keep an eye on what needs to be developed and how it is going to be developed. To ensure the visibility of your app in the app stores in such a competitive and complex technological scenario, you need to be very particular about the approach you follow for mobile app development. Here are some steps to follow for teachers looking to come together to build an amazing educational app for your students and teachers. Step 1: Ideation We always have ideas that strike us randomly and they sound amazing and perfect. Although these ideas may be brilliant, they may not necessarily be filling a need gap or addressing a pain point. An idea is said to be potential if it’s converted into a successful mobile application to solve a genuine problem of the target audience. As a teacher, your obvious target audiences would-be students, parents, and school faculty. The idea behind having an educational app is to extend the availability of teachers to his or her students. The Apps you develop should allow the students to learn round the clock because the app can serve as a tutor 24/7. It is a must that the idea actually is feasible, and the feasibility of the idea can be perfectly determined by conducting market research, performing a competitors’ analysis, and establishing well-defined goals and objectives within a fixed timeline. Post establishing the feasibility of the idea, the next step is to chalk out the timeline and the most specific goals you wish to achieve against the milestones. The base objectives could include sorting out the actual budget and scope, coming up with a USP, and defining the specific features that your app requires. Step 2: Determine what goes into your app Educational apps should have the ability to solve the problem. If your app fails to do that, it’s likely an entertainment app rather than being an educational app. Decide what you would like your app to do and make sure the user experience is your priority. Content is the king for any app to be successful. Thus, determine what content goes into your app. If your app will be assisting mathematical students with practicing addition or subtraction, for example, will you include only numbers or also elements to denote the numbers? Also, it is essential to frame how to reward the students who get questions right? Obviously, validation and feedback features come into play here. Like this, it is essential to gather the in and outs of your application before jumping into development. Step 3: Design Your Ideas It is essential to move your clearly worded ideas into visual representations of your thoughts. Since your key focus is education, your app should be very intuitive for kids & parents of all ranges. Now, create a cluster-sketch where you could write your core topic in the center of the page and surround it with possible subtopics. This will help you to brainstorm ideas that will provide you with the features of the app highlighting some major options. This also helps you define the foundation for your app. Having a solid foundation for your app idea is incredibly important, so take your time with this and be sure it’s exactly what you want. You should then start your prototyping phase which allows you to check whether your app is living up to its functionality and also get it tested by your team and the stakeholders involved in the mobile app development. Step 4: List the pros and cons As entrepreneurial teachers, you want to keep in mind that when an app gets released on the store, there are going to be items you will need to adjust. List out the app’s potential without forgetting the likelihood that somebody out there will find a reason to complain. The best way to lower your chances of negative feedback is to think about whom you are creating this app for and what they would find it most useful. Then, think about the people that wouldn’t use this and the reasons for it. The outcomes you receive will help you boost your ideas about what the functions are and how they work. Step 5: Development Most software developers prefer developing the app from the ground up all by themselves. There are few mobile app development platforms that can be used to build a fully functional app with just the main features also known as a minimum viable product. At this point, you start setting up your developer accounts on the app stores where you plan on releasing the app. However, the mobile app development process consists of multiple phases before launch: 1. The Alpha Phase: This is the phase where only the core functionality of the mobile app is developed, but it isn’t tested. 2. The Beta Phase: This involves bringing in all the major features and functions of the mobile app and is selectively released to a few external users for testing purposes. 3. The Release Phase: This is the final phase wherein all the bugs have been identified and fixed after multiple levels of testing, and the app can be released to all audience groups. What are the core features of an educational app? Generally speaking, the features list of educational apps can go on forever because of the wide range of situations for which the app is being applied. Today’s trend of educational app development is using AR/VR, Natural Language processing techniques, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to enrich the end user experience. So, here are the main features of educational apps, but don’t forget that you can always create and add something new and innovative: -Integration with social networks -Planning and scheduling -Videos and live streams -Surveys and tests -Leaderboards -Multi-Language -Cloud integration -Progress tracking and achievements How to create your app investment group as teachers? Going from a teacher and transforming yourself into an entrepreneur is not a simple thing. There could be multiple obstacles and roadblocks. The potential for entrepreneurial teachers is endless and all you need is to stay focused on what you want to build. In general, bringing an app idea to reality and converting it to success is much different than working a normal job or being a non-tech business owner. There’s a common myth amongst tech startup entrepreneurs that all they need to bring is their ideas to the table and from there, an investor will just hand them millions to launch their app next week. Then by the following month, everyone will be rich. It does not work like that at all, otherwise, everyone would be a successful app entrepreneur. First and foremost creating an investment group with like-minded teachers and school board members is the best place to start. Trying to make money over a shorter period of time is not a preferred approach, not only when it comes to investment clubs, but for individual investors too. A three- to five-year vision and analysis over your app idea and augmenting the investment sources from your groups is a good strategy for your app’s success. Becoming a group of entrepreneurial teachers is essential to formulate a strategy that focuses on long-term commitments and results. The following points could be useful when laying down the blueprints of your club’s strategy: -Understand the costs associated with app development, maintenance, and research on how to avoid hidden costs. -Commitment to a set fixed amount regularly, ie monthly, etc.. -Have a timeline set for each phase -Determine shares for each -Decide how profits will be used. The educational market has become a lucrative business and as a group of teachers, you can easily identify the needs and wants of the students, parents, and faculty and offer them solutions that could help them in many ways. SDI has immense experience in developing cutting edge educational applications where we have helped other teachers and parents achieve their business objectives. With strong experience in augmenting NLP, AR/VR, AI/ML we are aimed at offering a bright future for the education world. If you are a group of entrepreneurial teachers looking to develop a useful educational app, then it is the right time to consult with one of our industry experts at +1.408.621.8481 or email Rob at rob@sdi.la.