Who we are and what we believe

Skiffer was founded in Summer 2009 by Nathaniel Velez and Angel Ayala, two graduated students from the Engineering School and the Art And Sciences School of University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez. We develop and market online technologies that make it easier for schools to manage academic data and improve communications between parents, teachers and administrators. Our goal is to make online data management and communication services universally used on schools everywhere. We believe that this is possible if we can contribute on solving the conditions limiting universal adoption of online technologies in school:

• Software that is difficult to learn and use with limited functionality and last century aesthetics
• Business models where either service is free but support is not guarantied or service is too expensive with complex agreements and long implementation times
• Software that give educators a hard time because of their complexity and lack of accessible learning material and support channels

From the beginning we understood that solving those problems was not an easy task and that doing so required time, dedication. For almost 4 years we have done exactly that, working directly with teachers, administrators, parents and students improving every aspect of our technology, business model and support channels thru experience and passion. We believe that we are ahead of the pack in delivering the right solution that will make online data management and communications as common in education as it already is in other parts of our life. We think education can be greatly improved if technology is used to make education data immediately accessible to everyone involved in the education of a student.

A little bit of history

Because education is one of the most important pillars of all modern societies most people always have family members and friends working as teachers. Nathaniel was always the technical guy helping educators in his family and circle of friends in using technology to make all their paper work and grading easier. But the tools available were always awful, the Student Information Systems (SIS) and Online Gradebooks used by schools were ugly, complicated and slow. Spreadsheets were faster to work with but too complex for everyone except the most tech savvy. And even when Internet access was already commonplace, most teachers were not using it to collaborate and share their data.

At most schools online parent access was not widely in use. The complexity of the SIS schools were using made it very hard for teachers to keep all their online data constantly updated. The norm was that teachers were still using their paper gradebooks and copying the data online at the end of each school term. This made online access for parents and students unreliable on a day to day basis since the information online was rarely up to date. There was always the though of "It must be possible to do better than this".

While being a student Nathaniel created a prototype of what he tough an online app for managing grades and allowing parent access should be. The goals were for the app to be as easy to use as possible, fast in both loading and saving data and with an interface that empowered teachers to handle data in a fluid manner. The app needed to be fun looking and modern, the opposite of what most education software was at the time (and still is today). The first prototype was developed using Flash technology since today's modern web standards were not ready at that time.

After finishing his Masters in Architecture in Europe and returning back to America, Nathaniel approached Angel which had experience working in the Marketing Industry to help him find a way to transform his prototype into a product that real schools could afford and teachers enjoy. Both believed deeply that great changes were possible in our society if great tools for managing academic information and communications were used by most teachers and students.

During their first year they managed to start a pilot program with a few local schools. The initial prototype proved to be successful in two main areas: it didn’t required users to reload webpages to navigate since the app loaded data dynamically and teachers could add data inline with a series of simple controls. Thish proved to be a lot faster than the typical web forms still in use by most online gradebooks. The next step was adding a Student Information Management infrastructure required to manage the complexity of integrating all the academic data available for a student and allowing true online collaboration between the school community.

Back in the drawing board the team started the proccess of fully understanding the complexity of a school grading system. From this effort was born the idea of the School Tree ™ and the Grading Tree ™. Those simple concepts permited to easily organize all the grades on a student academic life. The system relate all grades and allowed for progressively calculating all final averages, all the way up the graduation. The system made Skiffer compatible withg most common grading methodologies. This development allowed us to launch the first paid version of the service on June 2010, which was in use by a dozen on schools during its first year.

The second version of Skiffer was released on August 2011 and brought an improved enrollment system that made it more faster and more flexible. The sliding boards were teachers work online were introduced with version two as a way of simplifying navigation. The Grading Card ™ was also born during this release as tool that allows teachers to easily adjust the way averages are calculated in Skiffer and visualize the math behind all calculations. Other innovations that were brought to the market in version two were the Grade Approval Process that required grades to be signed and validated by teachers before being saved and The Vault which is the system that logs all user activity and one of the most important security features in Skiffer today.

The emergence of the mobile web accelerated during the period we releases Skiffer 2 thanks to the availability of affordable mobile phones with always-on Internet Access and powerful browsers and apps. In response to this development we developed first mobile version of Skiffer.

Skiffer mobile was released on January 2012 and was the first version of the platform that was build using exclusively modern web standards and targeted towards iPhone and Android phones. It had a simplified user interface that allowed parents to quickly check the latest grades, assignments and messages on the go. Because of its simplicity it became a favorite between parents. The limitations of the mobile web forced us to carefully analyze how data was presented to users and all the experienced learned was the basis for the design of our latest release, the third version of Skiffer.

Motivated by the emergence of modern web standards as a viable development platform and the quick rise of mobile devices as the main point of entrance to the internet for many of our users our team made the tough decision of moving away from Flash and completely re-engineering Skiffer with a different set of technologies that included HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. This allowed us to target with a single codebase all devices including desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets. The vision of having teachers using Skiffer on their mobile devices wherever they are, even in the classroom, was enough motivation to put our energy behind the idea of bringing this new version to the market as soon as possible.

The beta version of Skiffer 3 was released for users to try on August 2012. This new version made it easy to deal with complex enrollment situations thanks to the introduction of the Smart Enrollment ™ technology. This technology allows Skiffer to intelligently analyze patterns in the data of each student to automatically determine the courses a student is enrolled on a specific year without any extra work from school administrators. With it dealing with multi-teacher scenarios and mixed groups situations was a breeze. The third version also brought a new home screen, the Book Shelve, that give users access to all the most important information on a single click. We also introduced a new notifications system that alerts users when new information is available for them. Every aspect of the user interface was improved for the new release including an improved Grading Card ™, a new compose window with text formatting options and integrated Dropbox support, an improved interface for working with lists and outlines, auto-saving and dramatically increased overall speed and fluidity.

The official rollout of the the third version of Skiffer occurred during the beginning of second semester of the 2012-2013 school year. All the time dedicated to developipng and evolving Skiffer have been amazing for all our team members. We have been able to to meet a lot of great people while working directly with tens of thousands of administrators, teachers, parents and and students along the way. Usage of the service has skyrocketed month after month and we are more than pleased with how Skiffer has simplified work for educators and improved collaboration between the whole school community. During the years we have validated that fact that real success can only be achieved over time learning from every step without taking shortcuts. Our commitment behind the cause of making online technologies work in the benefit of schools everywhere is as strong as ever.