Any San Francisco teacher who needs a second monitor can get one, via Two Screens for Teachers – TechCrunch
Any teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District who needs a second monitor can request one for free by Two Screens for Teachers, the nonprofit that recently granted a similar privilege to educators in Seattle. If you are a teacher in SF, You can register here.
A second monitor may sound like a power user move or a luxury to some, but for teachers whose days are essentially a huge group call, being able to see the call on one screen during class and other tools is a huge benefit on top of each other.
Two screens for teachers was started in September by Matt Scoreer and Mike Mathieu of Walk Score, and the first try from Easy Connecting teachers in need with people with a hundred dollars to spare quickly grew into something bigger.
By attacking local companies and VCs, they were able to raise enough money that every teacher in Seattle had a monitor to monitor the questions. It turns out to be more efficient to do so. Lerner and his team have negotiated bulk pricing with Dell and other companies, which significantly reduces the amounts required for a given district.
San Francisco was a natural next place to try and raise enough money, and they have now raised enough for that city as well as Oakland, Redwood City, and Contra Costa Counties. (San Jose is still a little short.)
This remarkable map, both hopeful and terrifying, shows the extent of what is needed and what has been achieved.
While the idea of hooking up more than 150,000 teachers to monitors seems gigantic, it must be noted that Two Screens for Teachers has generated more than 20,000 rustles in both large cities and small towns in the few months since its humble beginnings. An order of magnitude is nothing!
The final cost of equipping teachers across the country with the necessary equipment is approximately $ 23 million. It seems like an almost ridiculously low number for a single billionaire, perhaps one of the many whose net worth has grown tenfold in the last year, to write a single check. Here’s something to buy real cross-country goodwill with, cheap at the price.
For those of you who aren’t in the three point club (around four), it’s still possible to help in smaller ways, either through donations or Follow the instructions here send a monitor to a teacher in need.