This is a guest post by Audrey Watters, an education-journalist who writes for KQED MindShift, Edutopia, and O’Reilly Radar. You can also find her work on her own blog Hack Education.
I received the email from Knack for Teachers on Wednesday that the classroom data tracking and visualization tool would be shutting down. There’s also a blog post on the site to that effect. The servers will remain in operation for the next 3 months, the blog post explains, a time frame that “should be enough for all users to archive data and/or find another online gradebook solution.”
The app developer, Jarrod Drysdale, has written a longer piece on his personal blog about his work on the project. Knack for Teachers was, as he describes it, “a labor of love” — one that he dumped about $2000 of his own money into, but that almost no teacher used (and even fewer paid for).
Drysdale’s post is, not surprisingly, pretty bitter about the failure of Knack for Teachers, and while he chronicles the efforts he made in order to promote the product and to change it to help woo new customers, his conclusion to the whole affair is that teachers are “lousy customers.”