Why this exists, and who is actually behind it
My Teachers Toolbox was not built by a company that researched the education market. It was built at a kitchen table, by two people, because one of them kept coming home with the same problem.
My wife Criste has been teaching elementary school for more than twenty years. Twenty years of Sunday nights spent planning. Twenty years of 5am sub plans written with a fever. Twenty years of parent emails rewritten six times before sending.
She is very good at her job, and she was still losing her evenings to paperwork that had nothing to do with teaching children. That is not a Criste problem. It is what the job has become, for almost everyone in it.
I am a developer. For a long time my contribution to all of this was sympathy, which is worth approximately nothing at 9pm on a Sunday.
So I started building things. Not a platform, not a product — just a tool for whatever had gone wrong that week. Something to draft the parent email. Something to get sub plans written in fifteen minutes instead of two hours. Something for the morning a lesson fell apart and there was no plan B.
Every single tool in this toolbox came from a real problem she faced in a real classroom. Not one of them was invented in a planning meeting.
Criste still uses it every day. That is the whole quality process, and it is stricter than any roadmap.
If a tool does not survive contact with her actual Tuesday — twenty-five children, a fire drill, a schedule change and someone crying about a pencil — it does not ship. She has killed features I was pleased with. She was right every time.
We built it because we wanted something that actually helps, not something that looks good in a demo. Those are very different products, and you can usually tell within about five minutes which one you are using.
Teachers are asked to trust software with a great deal, often without being told what happens to it. So we made some decisions early and we are not revisiting them:
Our Student Data Policy spells all of that out properly, including exactly which companies process what.
This is a small operation. When you email support, you are not reaching a tier-one queue — you are reaching us. When a school asks about licensing, I answer it myself.
That is slower than a large company for some things. It is dramatically faster for others, including the one that matters most: a teacher tells us something is broken or missing, and it gets fixed by someone who cares whether it works.
You did not go into teaching to spend your evenings on documentation. This exists to give some of those evenings back.
If it does not do that for you, tell us why — we would genuinely rather know than not. And if there is a problem in your classroom that nothing in here solves yet, that is exactly how every other tool in the toolbox got started.
— Chris & Criste Allen
Fourteen days free, no card required. If it does not save you time, it has not done its job.
Questions, or a school enquiry? chris@allencodeco.com — I read every one.