What we do?
Quality Education for all is hard to achieve. Majority of teachers lack high-quality pedagogical expertise especially in emerging countries. There are recruitment and training needs for 70 million new teachers worldwide. How to train them in a cost-efficient way with quality results?
LessonApp is a mobile lesson planning tool designed to help teacher around the world. We want to raise the quality of education by empowering teachers: we have wrapped high-quality pedagogy, activating teaching methods and ready-to-teach lesson plans in a mobile app. It enables users regardless of the earlier experience to design and deliver versatile and inspiring lessons. LessonApp is reachable for everyone: it can be used on a mobile phone, computer, online, offline.
Latest news: Language versions coming soon! There will be Burmese, Portuguese and Romanian at first and later on Russian and Spanish!
Why we do it?
A teacher in a dim classroom with too many students. No resources, except for an old blackboard and a piece of chalk. The teacher gives the lesson the only way he knows: the teacher talks and the students listen. Every lesson continues the same way. Learning results are poor, frustration level high. This reality hit us when our teacher trainers were working abroad.
We were taken aback by this kind of a reality when travelling in emerging countries and training local teachers. Many of the teachers we met were doing their best, but without proper training and a higher quality pedagogical knowledge, it was impossible for them to do better.
Coming from Finland, a land of excellent learning results and a strong ethos of equality, this seemed fundamentally unfair to us. We have been training teachers in various countries around the world and we strongly believe that every child should be entitled to a high-quality education regardless of where they live.
This is the question that haunted us:
How is it possible that during this era, a time of an unlimited flow of information and efficient communication technology, we cannot offer basic pedagogical knowledge and tools for all teachers around the world?
After several passionate discussions over this question, we were suddenly struck with a realization: even in the most remote, unprivileged areas teachers very often have mobile phones. Even if they lacked all the basic resources required for teaching, they would still have a smart phone sitting in their pocket. Could we, then, share our knowledge of planning high-quality lessons with all of them?
Our mission was clear: we were going to create a mobile app for teachers around the world to help them deliver better lessons!
With the idea of the app, we soon realized that what we wanted to do was to equip the teachers with an understanding of the learning process and the necessary tools for planning efficient, inspiring lessons themselves. We wanted to empower the teachers in unprivileged areas while bearing this quote in mind:
“You give a poor man a fish and you feed him for a day. You teach him to fish and you give him an occupation that will feed him for a lifetime.” (Chinese proverb)
So how to turn this vision into reality? We realized that we needed to combine the pedagogical knowledge of Learning Scoop, Finland, with app development expertise. Team LessonApp was born .
Initially, LessonApp was created to help the teachers in emerging countries, but it turned out that teachers working in high-quality education systems also wanted to use LessonApp. They told us that LessonApp would help their work by providing them with new ideas and inspiration, as well as saving valuable time.
What we need is mutual learning and a global teacher community to support each other.
Our mission is to help teachers, the key players of quality education, and ultimately provide every child with the chance of experiencing the joy of learning!
