At Render, we believe the most impactful classroom technologies emerge from close collaboration with educators. Throughout our product development approach — which we call co-building — we actively seek educator input from the earliest stages of ideation to incorporate their first-hand experience and feedback to develop tools that support educator and student success.
This includes working alongside teachers to pilot potential technology solutions, a process where we test these technologies in classroom settings to gather actionable feedback and refine our approaches based on real-world use. The pilot phases of the co-building process are crucial, typically involving kick-off calls with teachers, mid-project feedback sessions, a final review, and an end-of-pilot survey to capture their insights. If feedback from long-term pilot testing in classrooms demonstrates their effectiveness, these tools are fully developed and made available in schools.
We’re excited to showcase how this collaborative approach works in practice. Meet GroupUp, Math Tailor, and Lit Booster—three early-stage technology tools we’re co-building in partnership with the educator community.
GroupUp
Research indicates that structured group work enhances student learning more than competitive or individual methods. Yet, creating effective classroom groups can be challenging and time-consuming.
GroupUp is a web application that streamlines this process by automating classroom grouping to optimize student outcomes. It assesses student abilities and compatibility so teachers can form purposeful groups that balance and complement different student abilities.
Teacher insights were crucial in shaping GroupUp. Our collaboration with the Pasadena Independent School District in Texas highlighted the need for integration with platforms like Canvas and Google Classroom to reduce the manual workload for teachers. Now, we are enhancing GroupUp to automatically sync grades and assignments with Canvas, while protecting student data through advanced security measures, which comply with Render’s extensive data privacy policies.
Feedback from this collaboration led to a six-week pilot that confirmed GroupUp’s ability to reduce group formation time from around 20 minutes to just five minutes. Teachers also discovered new applications for the tool, such as generating seating charts. We are now refining GroupUp further and preparing for a wider pilot this fall.
Lit Booster
Studies show that nearly a third of young students do not meet reading benchmarks. In response, we developed Lit Booster, a tool that connects teachers to evidenced-based educational strategies designed to help fourth and fifth graders read at grade level or above.
Lit Booster distills best practices from What Works Clearinghouse into clear, step-by-step guidance teachers can use to help students with reading comprehension, fluency, phonics, and vocabulary. It enables teachers to implement these strategies in the classroom through AI that can generate customized reading materials tailored to students’ interests and reading levels. Since beginning our partnership with educators last October, over 70% of participants reported the tool significantly reduced the time they spent searching for and implementing strategies.
Math Tailor
Math is a core academic subject in schools, yet many students struggle to advance their math skills. Research highlights the importance of providing just-in-time support to help keep students on grade-level work, which avoids pitfalls and leads to significantly better outcomes.
Building on these insights, Math Tailor assists teachers in grades six through eight in creating customized materials with AI to support their existing lesson plans. It utilizes content from Illustrative Math, an open educational resource that provides a comprehensive K-12 curriculum emphasizing accessibility that caters to a diverse range of student needs and learning styles.
Math Tailor enables teachers to quickly generate additional practice problems, review prerequisite skills, adjust language levels, and create extension work without the burden of manual customization.
Feedback from teachers during a recent pilot revealed its impact — they appreciated the possibilities of using AI to quickly adapt their materials to better meet the needs of their students. They also helped identify opportunities to provide even more value, like tackling challenges using AI to generate mathematical expressions and diagrams.
This fall, we’re launching a broader pilot to incorporate teacher input as we build the next set of features.
Looking Ahead
The time we’ve spent learning from teachers through co-building — in countless design sessions, check-in calls, and surveys — reinforces our belief that educators’ insights are critical to creating effective classroom technologies.
“We think we can solve a problem, but you never really know until you put something out there. Having educators tell us what they thought was incredibly important,” one GroupUp team member recently reflected.
As our Render team continues to refine GroupUp, Lit Booster, and Math Tailor to explore new ideas, we look forward to deepening our collaborations with partners across the learning community.
