Simply teaching the old-school “three Rs” of “readin’, ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic” isn’t enough for today’s educators.
Social and emotional learning (SEL) skills like empathy, self-regulation and teamwork, are top of mind in today’s schools, particularly in the United States, where research shows that early SEL interventions result in increased later achievement.
Enter Peekapak, a Canadian education technology company that has gone global with award-winning learning platform that integrates SEL skills into Language Arts curriculum through its engaging lessons, stories and digital games for children from Pre-Kindergarten to Grade 3.
Co-founder and CEO Ami Shah says the benefits of early SEL education are clear.
“The research shows that if you teach these skills at a young age, these kids will outperform their peers. And they will be able to cope with life stresses, not only in academics, but also in terms of getting a job or having a family.”
This is particularly true in the U.S., where more federal funds are being invested in education: “They’re finding that investing heavily in the students’ (early) education will pay off in the long run in terms of their success.”
Peekapak, founded in 2015, initially targeted the huge American market, where most states have adopted the national Common Core Curriculum. Peekapak tapped into that common curriculum with its teaching modules and its online game, myPeekaville, to map student learning in literacy and writing lessons to SEL.
“As a result, the district leaders and the school boards find it easier to adopt this, because it’s not requiring one more thing of the teacher,” Shah said.
Peekapak counts among its clients Denver Public School system, New Jersey’s Elizabeth Public Schools district, Illion’s Woodridge 68 School district and Pennsylvania’s Episcopal Academy. Because some Peekapak components are available free, the Toronto-based startup has 14,000 registered educators in countries around the world. Since programming is in English, there are users in such countries as the Australia, and among English-speaking ex-pat communities. There is also some ESL uptake. And, an ambitious team in Brazil has translated the program into Portuguese, for clients in Brazil and Portugal. There’s a lot of potential work for the 11-member Toronto headquarters.
Canada, with its school curriculum varying province-by-province, is another level of challenge and potential that Peekapak is tackling with help from ODX Ventures.
The company was part of the 2016 Ventures cohort, using the funding and mentorship, and access to education data made available through Kitchener-based D2L (formerly Desire 2 Learn), to map their curriculum to the learning expectations in Ontario.
“What ODX is allowing us to do is build out our platform to map to curriculum standards in Ontario,” she said. Part of that is through myPeekaville, where students interact online with illustrated characters and demonstrate their understanding of SEL skills. Their SEL experience is fed back to the teachers to help inform how they can support the student.
“myPeekaville is allowing us to capture the specific data at the student level and then tie it back to the standards mapping that we need to do. ODX has been making it possible for us to build out this functionality to give a unique student experience.”
And, “Because of their funding and support, it gave a vote of confidence to local funders as well, so we ended up actually getting follow-on funding because of ODX Ventures.”
Shah is enthused about the new opportunities so close to her home base: “We really are excited about connecting with educational leaders who are passionate about teaching these social-emotional learning skills and excited about how we can best meet the needs of Canadian students. We invite any educator to connect with us. We are very accessible as a team.”
