In today’s rapidly evolving educational landscape, teachers are often left juggling outdated tools or piecemeal solutions to create classroom materials.
BrightSprout aims to change that by providing a suite of online tools tailored specifically for educators. In an interview with
Website Planet, founder Jonah Phillips shared how BrightSprout simplifies the creation of customizable worksheets, crosswords, and flashcards, making it easier for teachers to craft the perfect resources for their students.
With a mission to empower rather than replace teachers, BrightSprout is committed to enhancing the classroom experience by offering tools designed with educators in mind.
Please present BrightSprout to our audience.
BrightSprout provides a suite of online tools that help teachers make classroom activities like worksheets, crosswords, flashcards, and word searches more easily. Teachers come to our site, make worksheets, and print them.
Currently, teachers who want to give worksheets or quizzes to their students (i.e. all teachers) have limited options. They can find something online, which likely isn’t a perfect match for what they’re looking for and often can’t be edited. Or, they can try to make something themselves in Google Docs or Microsoft Word. But how do you make a matching exercise in Google Docs? Or a crossword? A word search? Even a simple open-response question with lines for student answers leaves a teacher typing a whole lot of underscores in hopes of making something that looks barely good enough.
These tools aren’t made for teachers. BrightSprout is.
Please describe the story behind the company: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
I started BrightSprout because teachers are underserved by the tech industry. The conventional wisdom (which I heard a lot in the long two years before we were profitable) was “Don’t start a website for teachers. There’s no money in education.”
If you want to have an impact, you need to do something that others aren’t already doing or don’t think can be done.
The conventional wisdom is partially correct. It’s very difficult to make money in education if you’re trying to sell to schools or school districts. In school budgets, very little money goes to providing teachers with the tools they need to do their jobs. On top of that, there’s often a bureaucratic process that’s different for each school or district and difficult to navigate.
BrightSprout solves this problem by selling directly to teachers. Some teachers get reimbursed by their schools, but most just pay out of pocket because they’re committed to doing right by their students. I admire them. This is also why we’re committed to keeping our worksheet maker-free for everyone. I believe all teachers should have access to the tools they need to make basic classroom materials quickly and easily.
What services do you offer?
We offer five related tools for making classroom activities. Primarily, we have a worksheet maker that offers the flexibility of making almost any worksheet you can think of, and also offers support structures to make it easier than using a general-purpose tool like Google Docs.
Our other tools are designed for more specialized types of worksheets. The first tool we made was our crossword puzzle maker. Once that became successful, we added a word search maker.
Along with the more flexible worksheet maker, we launched a bingo maker and a flashcard maker.
Our general worksheet maker is free, although teachers can subscribe for access to premium features like additional fonts and clipart. The specialized worksheet makers are fully subscription-based, and our most popular subscription for teachers covers everything we offer.
What is the mission of BrightSprout?
Our mission is to provide tech tools to help educators be their best. We’re not trying to reinvent education, we’re not trying to replace teachers with AI robots, we’re not trying to decide what students should and shouldn’t be taught. We’re a teacher-focused company. We believe teachers know what’s best for their students. And we’re here to help them.
What separates you from other similar websites/companies?
We’re the only company that makes a general-purpose worksheet maker that’s designed for making worksheets. That’s an exciting place to be as a company, though also a scary one. There are other companies that offer more general tools that teachers have adapted for worksheet making, like Google Docs, Google Slides, or Canva. So, in a sense, that’s our competition. But, I really see that as competing with ourselves. Can we make this product good enough that people find it easier than doing what they’ve always done?
For our more specialized worksheet makers, we compete on user experience. The auto-arrange algorithm on our crossword maker was the most complex and challenging code I have written in my life. It was beautiful code! It took me about a day. You could find about a hundred other crossword makers that look like projects from a comp SCI class that someone decided to put online. The functionality isn’t hard. Creating an experience around signup, subscription, document management, and privacy—all takes time.
Do we offer the best user experience on the web out of any available crossword maker, any word search maker, any bingo maker, or any flashcard maker? Yes, I think so. But user experience is subjective; we’re comfortably in the top three in each category.
How do you envision the future of your industry?
I hope it becomes more user-focused—more teacher-focused. A lot of tech companies try to reinvent teaching, reinvent education, and automate away the teacher in the classroom. That’s a mistake, and it’s arrogant. Teaching is hard! If you offer an AI tutor that can’t do basic math, I mean… does anyone want it teaching their kid?
That’s the way a lot of smart people think the EdTech industry is going, and I think it’s going to be the opposite. New technologies can replace human workers, or they can empower them. I’m fully on the side of empowering teachers. Give them tools. Fix their problems. Help them be the best that they can be.
Find out more at:
www.BrightSprout.com
