The ChalkBird began in the fall of 2013 when my own twin sons had just started Kindergarten. My wife Jess and I were surprised at how haphazard communication was between the school and the parents. There were many channels: school web sites, class web sites, RSS feeds, emails, sign up services, back pack notes, and social media. These many channels, all run by different people, made it very challenging as a busy parent in a two-working-parent family to stay on top of everything. I want—like most of us—to feel involved in my children's education, but instead I felt disconnected.

It was also apparent that in their classes, the teachers and room parents who were trying to keep all the parents informed and engaged had massive amounts of unnecessary work to do, and probably not succeeding as well as they'd like despite all the work.

One of the main reasons for this is there were few if any tools that did an effective job of pulling all these tasks together into one unified whole so that everything—and everybody—was working together. So that became my mission: to build a tool to bring together parents and those who devote all or part of their days to educating our children—something that would make everyone's life easier, help me to strengthen the connection with my kids and, ultimately, enhance their education.

The result of that two years and everything since is The ChalkBird. I hope you find it useful.