Why we built Clever Badges

Find out what inspired us to build Clever Badges, and how K-2 teachers benefit from using them in their classrooms.

Have you ever witnessed a room full of 1st-graders trying to type in their passwords? Imagine 60 tiny hands lowering even tinier fingers, mashing keys…one…at…a…time. It might be cute to most of us, but for millions of teachers this process is a daily frustration that eats up precious learning time.

We’ve spent the last year talking with K-2 teachers to better understand this problem. Today, I’m proud to announce our answer: Clever Badges, an all-new way to login for young students to access all of their learning applications.

Teachers are endlessly creative, and as we learned from them, we found no shortage of creative workarounds to the login challenge – from printing passwords on student folders, to giving every student the same password, to the heroic teachers who personally login every kid by hand. But we knew there had to be a better way.

With Clever Badges, students simply flash their Badge and get access to all of their personalized learning applications. Our goal is to take something known as cumbersome and inefficient and make it fast, easy, and even fun! And best of all, Clever Badges significantly raises the bar for security and privacy in most classrooms.

Two years ago, when we built Instant Login, for the first time millions of students across the country were able to access multiple applications with a single login. Today I’m extremely proud of our team for creating a product that does the same for the youngest children. But even more, I’m excited to once again extend our mission of building technology that improves the learning experience for everyone. Especially for those with really tiny fingers.

With Clever Badges, students quickly login and learn. Find out how to start using Badges in your classroom in our Help Center.