Future of Education: Conversation with Tim Millen, CTO of CCC

In today's fast-paced world, it's more important than ever for schools to embrace technology.

But with so many different products and services available, it can be tough to know where to start. That's where the Center for the Collaborative Classroom (CCC) comes in.

Collaborative Classroom is a mission-driven, nonprofit organization committed to ensuring that all students become readers, writers, and thinkers who learn from, care for, and respect one another.

Since the organization was founded in 1980, their work has reached “more than 8 million students and 328,000 teachers in classrooms across the country [USA], developing fluent readers and skilled writers, supporting instructional equity, transforming discipline practices, and bolstering student and teacher engagement”.

In this interview, George, our CEO, discusses with Tim, CTO of Collaborative Classroom, the challenges and opportunities of technology adoption in education.

They also talk about how Collaborative Classroom is evolving to meet the needs of the next generation of learners with the products developed by us.


George: Hi, Tim. You are the CTO of Collaborative Classroom for 7 years. What are your challenges regarding the fast pace of technology adoption in education?

Tim: It’s an interesting market space at this point because of the fact that education is evolving technologically. Sometimes it’s pacing ahead of itself, like with AI and the introduction of AI into the classroom. But in general, the pace of the technical products that we’re deploying into the classroom are a little bit ahead of our competitors, but also meeting the needs of the challenges that our teachers letting us know that they or the problems they are trying to solve in the overall educational space it’s driven a lot by budgets and funding. And so we try to be very flexible and reactive to that.


George: How do you see CCC evolving in the following years?

Tim: As we begin to look at the next generation of our products, we’re taking a very close look at how the products are being used in the classroom with the teacher and how we can facilitate that to make it a better experience, more seamless experience, as well as something that is meeting the teacher’s needs more directly, so whether it would be a quick access to information, tools that are easy to use, we’re being responsive to what we’re hearing from our customer base.


George: We’ve been working together for 6 years now. What is about our collaboration that you value the most?

Tim: The relationship we have with X2 Mobile is the fact that they operate in what I refer to as a turnkey environment. We’re able to give them a problem that we have and have them come back with the options for meeting the needs of solving that problem. So it’s a lot different from when we were developing with other organizations where we were driving that. With the relationship of X2 we’re able to have them drive a lot of that portion of the product development.


George: Thank you. What has been the teachers’ response to the digital products we built for you?

Tim: We measure that by the adoption rate of how teachers adopt the products. And it is true that throughout the year, a school year, products have different purposes and different needs at different times in the years. But we do measure it by the fact that we’re finding more and more teachers using the products as well as their comments back to us and we know when they’re using the product is when they’re coming back and give us suggestions for improvement. So we’re very happy with the products and how they’re performing.

George: Thank you! CCC has 40 years of experience under its belt. What opportunities do you foresee for the following years?

Tim: As we begin to look at how education is changing and the different channels that we might have to pursue, to be able to meet those needs immediately, we’re looking at, you know, younger pre-K before the school starts. We’re also looking at how our programs actually extend into high school and how we can help facilitate that special requirement of using our products there. […]

Watch to the full interview here:

 

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