Cofounded by a teacher, an app seeks to ease the workload of the educators, while increasing class participation among students.
It’s no secret that being a schoolteacher is not a lucrative endeavor.
Teachers are underpaid, overworked and generally underappreciated despite doing one of the most important jobs there is — raising the leaders and decisionmakers of the future.
This is a worldwide phenomenon. In England, the number of teacher vacancies doubled from November 2020 to November 2022. In the United States, across 37 states teacher vacancies grew by 35 percent between 2021 and 2023. In Israel, nine out of 10 public schools don’t have enough educators.
Increasing student involvement
Cofounded by a schoolteacher, the education app FloWeavers is attempting to alter this gloomy trajectory.
“I love my job, but I reached a breaking point where I thought to myself, ‘Either I’m going to do this differently, or I’m going to quit,” FloWeavers cofounder Tom Azulay tells ISRAEL21c.
The FloWeavers app allows teachers to increase student involvement during — and outside — class hours, improve students’ social skills, initiate collaborative projects and provide them with a fun and simple way to navigate the educational environment.
Teachers upload tasks to the app, which students perform independently in exchange for points toward “educational incentives” such as coming without a uniform shirt for a day, switching places in the class with another student for a day, private lessons with a teacher of their choice, and more.
On paper, these steps sound like ways to placate the children. But Azulay says that using the app creates order, which makes the job of the teachers much easier.
“The education system is very tough. It doesn’t develop skills [in children], while teachers are drowning in administrative tasks irrelevant to the actual job,” says Azulay. “The day-to-day tasks of a teacher in Israel are exhausting and not interesting.”
Azulay explains that the problem stems from a lack of manpower. “Teachers are interior designers, nurses and secretaries. It chips away at you. It happens in other professions as well, but at least there, you’re compensated accordingly.”
Some of the assignments that teachers can upload to FloWeavers are their own tasks that they wish to designate to students to ease the workload.
The app also serves as an organizational aid for teaching staff, who can upload tips on staging events and activities.
Image - Courtesy of FloWeavers