Sometimes a product is so compelling that it's worthy of its own brand. Take
Slate, an online portal for high schools, for example. The platform, which centralizes data and digital tools, was created by Northern Liberties-based software company
Jarvus Innovations and has garnered more demand than the company can keep up with. As a result, Jarvus is developing Slate into a separate company, with the
Science Leadership Academy (SLA) and the
Sustainability Workshop as clients.
Slate was created by Chris Alfano, Jarvus’s CTO and SLA's Director of IT. The product has been developed through partnership with SLA for three years. The students, teachers and administrators at SLA had been using multiple networks including Google Apps,
Moodle and
SchoolNet -- and had separate accounts for each. Jarvus links those networks into a single database which users access through their Google account.
"Schools usually have four or five different systems that they use," says John Fazio, CEO of Jarvus. "Slate offers central access to connect different systems."
The program streamlines communication for both students and staff. In the past, when a teacher tried out a new digital grading book, for example, those numbers had to be exported to an Excel spreadsheet. With Slate, administrators can access information as the teacher adds it, regardless of what app the teacher uses. Likewise, teachers can maintain a history of their lesson content as they experiment with new digital programs.
"There's this flood of education technology tools," says Fazio. "Trying out new tools has a big adoption factor. Slate acts as that underlying dashboard system because we have their data centralized."
Jarvus recently enrolled Slate in
Good Company Ventures. They are hiring developers and senior software engineers, and will consider adding product managers with development backgrounds.
Source: John Fazio, Jarvus
Writer: Dana Henry