When the system fails, kids feel it: How Evisense can help by Jon Twycross

October is Black History Month, and both of my kids came home buzzing with excitement about their individual projects. The task? Research a prominent black figure from history or the present day. Fresh from attending the nasen awards, where we had sponsored the Changemaker Award, I had the pleasure of sitting next to the incredible Alison Eason, the winner. After learning so much about her inspiring work, I thought she would be a brilliant focus for Alba’s project.

But as it happens, life is busy, and time wasn’t on our

side. Between Alison’s full schedule and our own hectic routines, we realised it wasn’t going to work. So, Alba decided to do her project on Rosa Parks.

Naturally, this caused uproar from Astrid, who had her heart set on Rosa Parks too. In true Astrid fashion, she wasn’t going to be beaten! Instead, she chose to write and perform an original song as her project, and let me tell you, she went all in.

She wrote the lyrics herself, practised over and over, and after countless takes, we recorded the final version of her performance. It was wonderful—her spirit shone through, and she was so proud. With all that hard work done, you’d think sharing it with her teacher would be the easy part, right? Not so fast.

We handed in the written song, but the video? That’s where things went awry. I asked the teacher how to get the video to them, and they suggested uploading it to Google Classroom. Great, except the account needed sorting, which took two days. I finally got it uploaded, but the teacher still couldn’t see it. Days passed, and Astrid kept asking if the teacher had seen it yet, feeling disappointed when she heard nothing back.

All that effort, and the excitement of sharing her hard work, held up by a technical issue. It’s frustrating, and honestly, it struck me how this wouldn’t have been an issue if we were using Evisense. If we had Evisense in this scenario, I could have easily uploaded the video myself, added it to a post—maybe something like an “Update from Home” or “WOW Moment”—and shared it directly with her teacher. The teacher would’ve received a notification, and the video could have been viewed at their convenience, no mess, no delays.

It seems like such a small thing, but all that back-and-forth and confusion eats up time and creates frustration for everyone involved, especially the kids. That’s exactly why we’ve worked hard to make Evisense intuitive, feeding into skills people already have from using social media, rather than needing to learn something entirely new. Everything is kept in one place—no missing files, no technical delays, just simple, streamlined communication between home and school.

We’re still waiting for the technical issue with Google Classroom to be resolved, and Astrid is waiting patiently for her teacher to see the fruit of all her hard work. But in the meantime, I can’t help but think how much simpler things could have been if we were using Evisense.