Why Teacher's Desk exists
Teacher's Desk was not designed on a drawing board. It grew out of a very specific school day – and out of a technical question we were wrestling with anyway.
My wife is a teacher. Over the years she tried the usual programs, and none of them covered her day completely: one was a good gradebook, the next a calendar, the third a place to store materials. To cover everything she would have had to maintain three tools in parallel. On top of that came a discomfort many teachers know – entering the names, grades and observations of their pupils into a cloud that someone else can read.
Then she was transferred to another school – and the cloud access stayed with the old school, because it had never been hers personally. There was little time to move her data: years of materials, notes and preparation had to be pulled out alongside her regular teaching before the access ended. Once you have been through that, you think twice about putting your teaching library into a system that is tied to your employer. That is exactly why Teacher's Desk is tied to the teacher and not to a school – and why all content can be exported at any time.
She likes working with a tablet and stylus, and she was looking for something where handwritten notes and annotated documents have as natural a place as typed text – and that keeps everything automatically in sync across all of her devices. Today she uses Teacher's Desk on an iPad, an iPhone, a Microsoft Surface and at home on an iMac. That all of this happens without her having to think about it was one of the first requirements.
At Mindoo GmbH we were planning MindooDB at the same time – a platform for syncing data securely between several devices. The starting question was: what does a system look like in which the server cannot read the data but still organises the sync? Two more followed. How do we store data tamper-proof and with a complete history, so that everything can be restored after data loss or an accidental deletion? And how do we keep the whole thing simple enough to use and open enough for developers, without those developers being able to reach other people's data? Teacher's Desk is the application in which we first thought those answers through to the end.
We have been building groupware applications for many years, mainly around HCL Notes and Domino; we built the platform's new Java API for HCL. From that time we know the strengths of distributed data – work offline, sync later, lose nothing – and equally the weaknesses of that architecture. In MindooDB we kept the strengths and deliberately avoided the weaknesses.
Try Teacher's Desk for free – your data stays local, encrypted and exportable from the very start.