Press

Kirby Salerno launched ClassroomWindow in Needham last August to create a platform to review educational materials. Think TripAdvisor for textbooks. The goal is to build an online destination for people to review educational products – chemistry textbooks or interactive whiteboards for the classroom – and give the buyers of these products a place to find out what worked and what didn’t. … “We want to redefine ways that schools buy products, and the ways vendors and publishers create products,’’ Salerno said. The full article can be read here.

“One of the major failings in the educational marketplace is a lack of data from end users,” said company founder and CEO Kirby Salerno, noting that the $25 billion K-12 market is dominated by major suppliers such as the publishing houses McGraw-Hill and Pearson. “This puts teachers in an incredibly powerful position.”

Teachers may be the users of classroom products in K-12 schools in the U.S., but others in the schools actually choose which products to buy, such as textbooks and technology. It’s a dysfunctional market, according to ClassroomWindow — a brand-new web startup in Needham that wants to upend the market with a Yelp-style, crowdsourced approach.

Classroom Window…is building a data system that would combine Consumer Reports-like expertise with crowdsourced knowledge like that popularized by Yelp in order to report what innovations are being used in a given context, how they are being used and how that leads to both teacher and principal satisfaction as well as to student achievement.