Episode 2: Effective Tracking with Learn 21 Founders Bill Fritz and Kevin Ghantous

This week we talk with Bill Fritz and Kevin Gantos, leaders with deep roots in the edtech world, on what inspired them to start their non profit organization-- Learn 21-- for schools. Contact them at [email protected] to learn more.Transcription:Zack: On today’s episode I’ll be speaking with two people with deep roots in the edtech world. Here today we’ve got Kevin Gantos...Kevin: I’m Kevin Gantos. I am the IT Operations Manager for Learn 21.Zack: And Bill Fritz...Bill: I’m Bill Fritz. I'm the Director of Technology at Sycamore Community Schools.Zack: And they are the co-founders of Learn 21 -- a non-profit providing innovative, cost-effective educational technology solutions by educators for educators. So Kevin, tell me a little bit about your background.Kevin: I’ve been working in edtech for 18 years now and I've worked a variety of jobs within different schools doing data base management and software development. When Bill and I started Learn 21, we started about 12 years ago and as an organization we were really just trying to focus on helping schools manage their IT and it's really just evolved from that original vision over the last 12 years.Zack: Yeah, so both of you guys, as I understand it, have been a part of the edtech industry for a long time. Bill, can you fill us in on your background as well.Bill: I’ve been at sycamore since ‘94. I’ve been the Director since roughly in the early 2000’s as well as the Executive Director of Learn 21 along with Kevin. We founded Learn 21 about 12 years ago. Our goal when we were working together-- actually Kevin was on my team at Sycamore-- we recognized the need of a lot of school districts around us with resources of software development, data integration, management and didn’t have those resources so we started working together and collaborating with schools around us to come alongside schools to help them in areas where maybe they didn’t have the resources or the knowledge. My background previously was I was in business software as well and coming into the edtech space and now with Learn 21 we are also the Ohio CoSN chapter, so we have taken on a leadership role trying to be K12 tech director advocates-- mentoring as well as Kevin’s team is really coming alongside schools and providing software solutions for them as well as we have an arm of Learn 21 that actually is supporting online learning, online schools, instructional coaching and content development.Zack: It seems like you guys are positioned really well to understand what is going on in your schools and also finding out: How can we solve these problems uniquely and quickly? Specifically concentrating on the one to one manager for the data point, can you talk about the specific problems that caused you guys to design this portion of the software?Bill: Yeah, I’ll just jump in and talk a little bit about-- I think Kevin and I originally -- way even before Learn 21 -- we recognized that a lot of these problems aren't just unique to Sycamore schools or the work we were doing. We recognized that student data dashboard or when we went one to one about 7 years ago we had the same challenges as everyone else. So Zack it was more about-- I’m about to hand devices out and immediately I looked at Kevin's team and I said, “I don’t want to do this on spreadsheets. I want to have a robust enterprise solution. About 10-15 years ago there weren't a lot of enterprise solutions around meaning that interoperability was happening meaning that you've got a piece of software that interacts with other pieces of software moving data back and forth making your life a lot easier. And that's a lot of what we started with at Learn 21 is trying to provide systems of integration and especially around when we went one-to-one. So Kevin’s team worked closely with us at Sycamore and...