NY Startup: We Talk With Three Ring The Winners Of Best Education Startup At New York Tech Day

At the recent New York tech day a startup called Three Ring walked away with the best education startup award. In short three ring provides a platform that makes it incredibly easy to digitize students work. The backbone of the Three Ring system functions as a portfolio or digital filing cabinet.

Teachers can use an iPhone or Android phone and take a photo or video of a student assignment. From there they can organize the entries by tags including student name, class, assignment and other core parts of the assignment which makes it incredibly easy to recall for later use.

Teachers can use the assignments stored in Three Ring to provide assessments of the students work, go over the assignment more in depth with students and easily recall assignments for things like parent teacher conferences.  Three Ring is currently in beta and only for teachers however Three Ring plans to incorporate a parent, student and administrator component.

In the future a parent module or student module could easily be the remedy for “the dog ate my homework”. The possibilities with all four components are endless. Later on, Three Ring could be a way for students to submit an assignment to a teacher once completed. Imagine uploading the assignment to Three Ring and even if the student couldn’t make it to school, got sick before class, or had to leave early for a football game an assignment could be turned in to a teachers Three Ring account and the student could still get credited on time.

There are several tools out there in the digital world for teachers. Three Ring makes is an extremely easy to use tool that can be adapted to several scenarios.

More after the break



We had a chance to speak with Steve Silvius, one of the co-founders of Three Ring and the company’s Chief Education officer about Three Ring and their experience winning the New York Tech Day, Best Education Starutp award.

 Three Ring is a web platform and mobile app that makes it incredibly easy to digitize student work. The work is organized so that it can be quickly retrieved and used for a variety of pedagogical purposes. Three Ring takes a simple and elegant approach and is committed to building tools that will engage and help teachers and students.

 Michael Lindsay, co-founder and CEO: Michael is a graduate of Yale, Oxford and McKinsey with a passion for thought and implementation. At Oxford, he was next door neighbors with Steve which led to many conversations about the education space. Over the years, these conversations continued and evolved until Michael was ready to build off his personal passion and work to create a company that would support and build capacity for authentic teaching and learning.

Alec Turnbull, co-founder and CTO: Alec is a graduate of Columbia University. He is a self-taught and committed  programmer who has worked in a variety of companies and countries developing websites, apps and basically everything else. After working with a variety of Fortune 500 companies and startups such as The Daily Muse, Alec decided to turn his talents towards the education space with Three Ring

Steve Silvius, co-founder and Chief Education Officer: After graduating from Georgetown, Steve returned to his native Southern California to teach High School Mathematics. He has an incredible passion for teaching. Steve began tutoring and teaching SAT prep classes while still in high school and plans to remain committed to education for a very long time. As the recipient of a Marshall Scholarship, Steve attended Oxford where his research focused on the discourse in secondary school mathematics classrooms. With Three Ring, Steve is excited to build on his academic work as well as practical experience with teaching and learning.

Three Ring is based out of New York City. Our office is currently in Union Square.

Three Ring is an education company. We are firmly committed to the support of quality teaching and learning. So, we decided that it was important to reflect that dedication in every aspect of the company–including executive titles.  We hope that the title of Chief Education Officer makes clear how important it is for us to understand the education space, the needs of teachers and students, etc, and to reflect these understandings in all of our decisions.  The Chief Ed. Officer shares responsibility for the product, business development and company strategy, while assuming primary responsibility for employment and training, community management, marketing, thought leadership, sales, and related areas. We assume the role (and frankly all roles at Three Ring) will continue to evolve as the company grows and responsibilities are shifted.

Yes. Currently, our product is very teacher-focused, but we are working hard to build many different ways for students to interact with and use the product.

Though Three Ring is still in very early beta, teachers are using it all across North America and in many countries throughout the world. We are running a few more intensive pilot tests but are not publicizing them at this time.

 With Three Ring, student work is not stored on the personal mobile device, although it can be accessed there. We do not often hear this particular privacy concern (we assume because teachers already have control over the storage of student work and are typically trusted to do so as part of their professional responsibilities). However, privacy is a legitimate issue in various ways and we are committed to doing all that we can to ensure a high standard in this regard.

 No. I would not want to predict the distant future but a bedrock principle at Three Ring is that there are many cases where non-digital media are the best and most appropriate for teaching and learning. Personally, I do not see this changing in an absolute way anytime soon. Pen and Paper work remains extremely important and I believe there will always be a large number of people who find it convenient and effective.

Keep working. To build something from nothing you have to have a lot of luck but you also have to continually put yourself in the position to create and take advantage of luck.

Meet people and listen authentically to them. This is one I am trying to concentrate a lot on lately. It is especially important in the education space where teachers and students are used to being largely overlooked.

Which leads to….Respect Teachers, Respect Students, Respect Teaching and Learning: Teachers are used to being categorized as dinosaurs who hate all change, particularly technology. This is silly. Teachers use Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and plenty else. Teachers do, however, resist using technology that does not work well for their routine, does not do much to enrich teaching and learning, or does not meet their standards for quality curriculum. This is proper. Teachers and students should resist technology that does not adequately serve an important educational purpose for them.

The above is part of a larger lesson that I suppose every schoolchild knows…question stereotypes. Conventional ideas about people typically lack nuance.  Take for example recent studies complicating the stereotye of youth as “digital natives”.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/are-todays-students-truly-tech-savvy/16147 and  http://www.agent4change.net/resources/research/1088-open-university-research-explodes-myth-of-digital-naive.html

Last lesson, starting a company up is a lot of work and extremely rewarding but you need partners you can rely on, perseverance, and a strong commitment to values deeper (but hopefully enmeshed in) the company.

Wining Best Education Start Up at Tech Day was awesome. The next day there was a ton of work to do.

We plan to become the brand that schools, students, and teachers turn to for tools that support and facilitate authentic assessment in the service of teaching and learning. Stay tuned!