Seesaw – Best in Class

For helping to make remote learning work during the pandemic.

- By Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

The New School

Seesaw is used in three-fourths of all U.S. schools by educators such as Jennifer Montemayor, a kindergarten teacher in San Antonio.

Carl Sjogreen could tell early on that the Covid-19 pandemic was going to affect his business. It didn’t take long before he found out just how much.

In January, Sjogreen saw that his education app, Seesaw, was experiencing a drastic uptick in new accounts in Asia. By the following month, some students were posting projects on it at 10 times the normal frequency. As schools there closed, Seesaw became a link for at-home students to their teachers, projects, and classmates. The company’s 55-person, San Francisco-based team quickly built features that would ease the app’s transition from the physical classroom to a virtual learning environment.

Their hard work paid off, helping traffic and usage soar even further when, within weeks, a wave of U.S. schools shut their doors as well. But the sudden growth made it hard for the five-year-old company to scale its servers on some days. Meanwhile, Seesaw had to abide by a San Francisco city order to stay out of the office. Its employees—many former early-career teachers—suddenly needed to collaborate virtually to meet the surging demand.