What if students were connected to working experts in the field of what they are learning?

How many times do you hear students say, “when am I ever going to need this?"

When I was teaching I tried to bring experts into the classroom to talk about their work in light of the content or skills I was teaching. But it’s hard! All of that scheduling and making sure the experts know how to talk to children. Oy.

I dreamed of a world where I could contact experts at my fingertips and video-chat with them in my classroom for 20-30 minutes of sharing about their work, making what I was teaching relevant to my students, and broadening my students’ ideas of the jobs and careers that are out there.

Last week I attended the NYC Education Forum where 11 startups in the education-technology sector presented their projects for a chance to win $10K. Nepris, the winner, recognizes this need and has done something about it! Teachers go on Nepris and look for experts who use what they are teaching in class and then schedule a time for them to video-chat with your class. The brilliance of Nepris is that it leverages the LinkedIn community to find industry experts, vet them, and connect them with students.

What if for everything you learned in school there was an expert who uses that content waiting to video-chat with you?