Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Handwriting Meets High Tech: David Bleicher on Jotit's Mission to Reinvent Classroom Learning
David Bleicher is the Co-Founder and CEO of Jotit, a company on a mission to bring handwriting back to the forefront of education in the digital age. By blending proven learning methods with advanced technologies, Jotit enhances student outcomes and executive functioning in the classroom.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why handwriting remains essential in today’s tech-driven classrooms.
- How Jotit integrates handwriting, AI, and executive function tools for students.
- The multimodal learning approach and its benefits for diverse learners.
- Innovative features Jotit provides to empower teachers in digital classrooms.
- Insights into building strong partnerships with Google and Owl Ventures.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:01:30] David Bleicher introduces Jotit: blending traditional handwriting with advanced technology.
[00:03:00] How David’s personal mission to help his son Uri inspired Jotit’s creation.
[00:08:16] The cognitive benefits of handwriting and its irreplaceable value in education.
[00:11:00] Jotit's multimodal approach: handwriting, typing, voice—all in one platform.
[00:14:45] Tools for teachers: streetlight control, lockdown mode, and real-time classroom interactivity.
[00:18:30] Why simplicity in classroom tech design is critical to teacher adoption.
[00:21:43] Redefining digital classrooms with tailored tech—not repurposed entertainment devices.
[00:23:07] Strategic partnerships: How Jotit collaborates with Google and Owl Ventures for scale and impact.
[00:26:30] Jotit's future and David’s continued mission to impact millions through foundational learning tools.
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[00:00:00] David Bleicher: Every teacher knows that. And that's one of the reasons why pen and paper are still the most prominent tool for teaching in the classroom. So there's so much ed tech, and we have this whole podcast is about ed tech. And yet you walk into the classroom and more than 50% of the time teachers are. Standing and the learners are handwriting on paper or on Xerox pages or on worksheets, which are a big part still of education.
And again, they understand their teachers, they know and they have the intuition of what works. If they thought that EdTech would be able to replace it, they'd be the first to do it. It's a hassle. They don't want to xerox papers, they don't want to go with a pile of tests back home. So. They know very intuitively that handwriting works.
[00:00:50] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll
[00:01:03] Ben Kornell: find it all here at Ed Tech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar and to go deeper.
Check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
[00:01:30] Alex Sarlin: David Bleicher is the co-founder and CEO of Jotit, a company on a mission to bring handwriting back to the forefront of education in the digital age by blending proven learning methods with advanced technologies. Jotit enhances student outcomes and executive functioning in the classroom. Previously, David co-founded Vertex an AI and computer vision startup acquired by Nike in 2018.
Following the acquisition, he established and led Nike's AI and Innovation office in Tel Aviv, developing some of the company's most impactful AI driven products and capabilities.
[00:02:02] David Bleicher: Hello, EdTech insider listeners. We are so excited to have the co-founder and CEO of Jotit David Bleicher here. Very, very exciting to have you on the show and hear a little bit about how you're using ai.
Just so everyone has the background, you're bringing handwriting back to the forefront of education. What inspired you to create the company and what problems are you solving for students and educators? Great. So first of all, thank you for having me. I've been listening to your show and have been looking forward to speaking with both of you, so I'm happy to be here.
And I'll tell you a little bit about the inception story of Jotit, which is interesting, and also handwriting kind of everyone is speaking about flashy things and then we go with this seemingly old school Yeah. Thing called handwriting. And I think that. You'll hear, and through the conversation, you'll definitely be convinced if you aren't already of the importance of this piece in education.
And if we're here, you know, we're in ed tech, but if we're believers in the ED part more than the tech, and we're looking at the tech as an enabler of the ed, then we're definitely gonna have an interesting conversation. There's a reason why the ED comes first. It's not tech ed for a reason. The ED comes first.
So starting about. Myself, just to introduce, I'm 44 years old, um, father to four children. Married, lived a whole life in Israel, grew up here, half American and half French. Got into entrepreneurship relatively late to some people who do their first exits at 25. I didn't know what entrepreneurship was until I was in my thirties.
I started my first company in Vertex. It was when I was just after my 30th birthday. And that was a very different area, different journey, et cetera, but it was very condensed. So throughout four years I. We did all the mistakes we could. You know, we went on the rollercoaster, we went up, we went down, we had to fire people.
We were able to raise money. And fast forward four years later, we were acquired by Nike. So we had like a very condensed startup journey to get to a very, very nice peak. At the end of it, get a lucrative acquisition, receive a huge responsibility the day after that. To establish an RD and AI center for Nike here in Israel and and develop some of the most important features and parts.
Some of them are consumer facing and some of them are not. For Nike to generate billions of revenues in their direct to consumer business. And this is interesting. It is exciting, but I will say that at the end of the day. Everyone, including both of you, probably has much broader purpose than making money.
And once you start working for a corporation and one that really, the dollars are a significant part of how you're measured, and Covid was a big accelerator for me as well, to come to the understand that I wanted to do back to basics, back to doing something that's a startup that is impact related. I wanted to do something that will impact millions of lives.
To the good and education was a calling just because I'm a father to four children. They're all in school. In, I had the privilege to spent almost two years with them being very, very much involved in their day-to-day studies and being exposed to all their problems. And so their three daughters, Naomi Yara and Avigail, and one boy Ori and Ori was.
Having a lot of struggles. He is an A DHD kid. He's dyslectic as well, and he's almost like the poster child of where someone who's super smart and motivated and could be the best student and have the best future in the world is discouraged and gets lost in all of the mess that's in school. And so I put myself a mission.
I didn't even think it's gonna be a startup at the first day. But I put myself on a mission to help Uri, and the way I wanted to help Uri was to streamline. I, I understood by following him throughout these years that what was missing for him was order. He needed everything streamlined. He needed to connect all of the physical, the books, and the notebooks, and the calendars, and the binders and the Xerox pages, and all the digital amazing curriculum and simulation apps, et cetera.
And all of that was creating like a whole blurry cloud in his mind. And he needed help streamlining this and bringing these two things together into like a clear experience where he can focus on studying and focus on bringing his talents out and not on getting lost and getting discouraged and, you know, just getting demotivated.
And so I. I built this as a side project. Originally, I just hired some developers and built an app that would pull this information from the different sources, so from the LMS, from the SIS, from other places. So it's all gonna be organized for him. And the moment we were able to do that, I immediately saw two things.
One, I saw him starting to succeed again. So really like a firsthand experience of seeing him succeed. But more than that, I've been building products for 20 plus years. I've never seen such a pull from the market. So everyone I talked to about this product said, Hey, this is amazing. I had this idea when I was 10 years old, and I, like everyone had invented Jotit in their minds and wanted to go this way and said, okay, I don't know what a startup, is it gonna be even a startup or not?
But when you have it, I want to enroll my school. I want my kids to have it, et cetera. I was really like, I've never felt such a strong pull from any product that I've ever built. Whether it's in a startup or whether it's in a large company. And so this was a very key clue to me to say, Hey, this is a calling.
This is what we want do. We can help millions of kids. And the maturity of being second timers, and both Yuval, who was my first telephone, who's my co-founder and a business partner who lives in the US and drives all the business. So calling him in and saying, Hey, there's something exciting here. I want you to join me again.
He was my co-founder in my previous startup also. And say, Hey, this is exciting. Let's do it together. Let's do something meaningful. And this is how we hit the road.
[00:08:16] Alex Sarlin: That's great. We love when something so personal becomes a project that can help so many people. A few ed tech founders have that type of really personal story.
It's about their own children or themselves as a learner, and then it becomes a product that can benefit many, many people. One thing we always talk about really loving about AI in ed tech is that AI can sort of take very. Messy inputs and then sort of make sense of them and synthesize them and clean them and summarize them.
And when I hear you talking about handwriting and executive function and some of the things that Jotit helps with, you said like the cloud in your son's mind, that it's like cloudy ideas, but then Jotit can help organize. I'd love to hear a little bit about what are some of the cognitive benefits of handwriting.
Like why should people still be writing, and then what do you sort of. C as the main way that AI can take the sort of the mess of handwriting and thought processes and clean them up in a product like yours?
[00:09:14] David Bleicher: Yes. So first of all, there's a lot of science behind handwriting. So handwriting has been around for thousands of years.
And it's gonna be here for thousands more. So this is something that we got a little bit confused over Covid when we thought that we could replace with typing, we could replace with other things. But at the end of the day, when I want to be present in the moment when I'm preparing for a call with you guys or anything else, you know, I'm, I'm holding a stylus or a pen in my hand, I'm taking notes.
This helps me basically translate what I'm hearing in a different frequency. To my own words, to my own visuals. I have the freedom and creativity that I don't have while typing to say, Hey, this leads to this. So there's gonna be an arrow here and a arrow there, and maybe a little drawing here. And so it's very intuitive to anyone who grew in our generation to understand the importance of that.
And everyone who really wants to be present is typically gonna hold a pen in hand. Now this extrapolates as well, if you wanna look at. Let's take math as a subject, right? I don't know any person who can pass math test without having actively practiced handwriting math equations and problems and geometry, and it doesn't matter.
You can bring the most amazing simulation software and AI tutors, and you name it. At the end of the day, if you don't do the active learning, if you don't. Write down and practice and get the habit of doing the work, you're never gonna succeed. So it's very, very intuitive and very, very grounded in the basics.
And every teacher knows that. And that's one of the reasons why pen and paper are still the most prominent tool for teaching in the classroom. So there's so much ed tech, and we have this whole podcast is about ed tech. And yet you walk into the classroom and more than 50% of the time teachers are standing and the learners are handwriting on paper or on Xerox pages or on worksheets, which are a big part still of education.
And again, they understand their teachers, they know and they have the intuition. Of what works. If they thought that EdTech would be able to replace it, they'd be the first to do it. It's a hassle. They don't want to xerox papers, they don't want to go with a pile of tests back home. So they know very intuitively that handwriting works.
There's a ton of science. So when I started going down the rabbit hole of learning about this subject, there's endless, you know, from MRIs looking at the brain and how it. Activates differently when you hand write than when you type throughout empirical experiment where they took a class and split it in half, and the half that were handwriting their notes were 20% more successful than those that weren't to even The extent that learners at the elementary level who are not learning to hand write correctly, are having trouble learning to read, so their literacy is also compromised.
So all of this together to say. It's clear handwriting is here to stay. And the question is now how do we blend this into a digital world that we live in, into these digital adults, that these kids are gonna be? And it really, really is. Paper is not the solution. And so really blending these two together.
Is the mission that Jot is on? Yeah, it so resonates with me and there's a way in which technology has been organized to solve problems of efficiency so that you can do mass assessment or you can do more efficient production of learning. And there's a way in which the AI efficiency gains. Are redistributing the kind of use cases of technology, whereas like keyboarding as an efficient way of communicating allows electronic communication and so on.
Now, that's no longer the case, so we're creating these learning access barriers. Whether a kid can keyboard or not limits them to access and the speed and the cognitive lift of keyboarding actually gets in the way of the cognitive lift of learning. But we were willing to take that cost because we needed ways to digitally assess.
Students and we needed ways to digitally collect data. And so now you go back to a fundamental premise and say, wait, that no longer is a limitation. How might we rework? And Alex and I often are talking about voice as well, and we're finding that I. For English language learners or for learners who have processing disabilities, there's ways in which Omni modal AI creates multiple lanes for students to express and to engage in learning that's no longer limited by discrete modality.
Now one thing about handwriting, there's both the words on the page, but there's also the ability to draw, organize your thoughts. Can you tell us a little bit about how Jotit supports like metacognition, uh, and kind of all the things that we try to do with paper in a learning environment? How do you support those things?
And then a little bit about the teacher side. So we've been focusing mainly about the learners, but how does this change the game for teachers and what are you seeing in terms of the teacher community? Great. So these are two separate questions. I'll answer them one after the other. First of all, about the multimodality that you talked about, and this resonates a lot because as we progress Jotit, we also progress our offering to the student.
And we understand that multimodality that you're talking about. It's part of it. So in Jarts notebook, you can obviously hand write and it's smart notebook that read your handwriting. It can change it to text, it can do spell checking, grammar checking, fact checking, math. All these amazing things happen on your handwriting.
But yet, in the classroom, in a diverse classroom, one kid will not feel comfortable writing or even in a specific subject. They'll say, now typing is better. So they can also use typing modality in jart. And they also, you talked about recording, they can also use recording and say, Hey, we're practicing a language like you said, and so we can record something and this recording is gonna come to the teacher.
So we're, instead of trying to tell the, the educators what to do and the kids what to do, we're trying to give them the abilities and possibilities. And, and so this is kind of very much resonating with me, your offering about this multimodality. This is something that's. Baked into our product and is being baked into our story and our offering as well.
Yeah. I would just say also from a design perspective, this really opens up the learning design of a classroom. I remember when I was at alt school, we would have students take pictures of student work and then submit it online, but it, it was still a photo and you'd have to analyze it. And then we were finding all the photos are blurry, and we're like, why is it that all the kindergarten and first grade.
Photos are all blurry, but the second and third graders photos aren't blurry. And what we realized is we had to redesign the iPad camera. Instead of having the one button that you push with one thumb, you had to do it with two thumbs. 'cause kids didn't know how to steady a camera to take the picture. And so it got me really thinking about how we are creating these barriers.
Now if you actually say this is a native way in which people express creativity, coloring, drawing, writing, early language is on a paper, on a page. That's also their early metacognition, early thinking. And so you're able to like bring. Deeper concepts to life with actually no friction. So tell us a little bit about the teacher side then.
Like how are teachers using this and what possibilities is it unlocking for them? Yes, and that's an amazing thing. It took us time to start thinking about that because we were so, because of my own son, and then because this is such a student, student-centric system. So we spent all of our first, let's say 18 months developing, perfecting the user experience for the students.
To the place where students love it, can't go anywhere without it, that it becomes their second nature. But we neglected thinking about the teacher while doing the process. And then when we work, part of our development process is we're all the time in classrooms, you know, hundreds of hours in classrooms being a fly on the wall and, and seeing the product, the news, and, and we understood something crazy that a teacher that stands in front of a digital classroom.
Needs very different tools than the same teacher that was standing in front of a classroom full of paper and and pages before. And so we understood that this transition is so natural to move from paper to digital paper. That's something that is happening and is already happening in the universities.
You know, you look at colleges, everyone is with an an, uh, iPad or whatever. The teachers, so now they're standing in front of a classroom where all of their students are, is holding, you know, such a, you know, whether it's a tablet or a Chromebook or something that they can write on. But now how do we equip them with a tools to manage a classroom that has this?
And so we started building things, and I'll give you two or three examples that are really, really important and are, are really changing the lives of these teachers. First one is a very simple one. It's just a streetlight options regarding the internet. So. On red, it means eyes on me. So they don't need to go into, I don't know, whatever software and find the solution.
How do they just have it on their Chrome browser? Wherever they have, they have this streetlight and they say, Hey, I wanna be red. No internet, yellow, only the links that I posted on my LMS are available. Nothing else is available. Or green, Hey, they have a, a research project that allow them for the next 45 minutes to roam the internet freely.
So this is one simple and small concept that someone standing in front of a digital classroom needs to have in a very simple way. You cannot complicate it. You cannot make it hard. It needs to be simple and it works. It just, the simplicity is kind of our, I would say, like our guide when we develop.
Another thing that we've lately released, which is really important is called lockdown mode. So say you wanna have your students, younger kids, and you say, I want these kids. Focus on a specific website, on a specific worksheet, on a specific page in the book. Instead of having them now find the book, find the page, some of them forgot it, some of them have it.
So just, you know, again, two clicks from the teacher. Say, Hey, I want them here and I want them locked in here. 4 45 minutes and let's say with or without a calculator. And so two or three clicks. And now that everyone is in the zone, everyone is focused. There's no noise or distractions, which is one of the things that is bothering in digital classrooms.
So step by step, we're figuring out what teacher that stands in front of the future classroom needs, and we're working very closely in collaboration. Actually, my previous call at the end of a few minutes ago with a teacher in a school that was one of the first triers of. Some of the lockdown mode features and it's, it's amazing how much it helps them.
And so, and it goes on and on. I can talk about more, you know, there's interactivity, for instance, you know, you're looking at Kahoot, which is super successful in education, but Kahoot is a shift of state. So now we're on paper and now we take out our phones and now we scan a QR code and now we're in a game mode and we've shifted our state.
And if all I wanna say is, Hey guys, how are you feeling this morning? Press one button and everyone within your notebook will pop up. Nine, you know, smiley faces. And I can track how emotionally I, my students are doing every morning or even five times a day. It just takes one click or say who understands and who didn't understand.
And so without being embarrassed to, to raise their hand and all of that, they can just, you know, put their vote in. Teacher can see what's going on. Students can anonymously see what's going on. So. This is a lot of small nuances that describe basically this bridge between traditional learning and classroom engagement in the future and, and how, you know, how these two are not two separate worlds and require a leap.
How do we make that a continuum? It
[00:21:43] Alex Sarlin: strikes me as I hear you talk about this, I'm sure teachers absolutely love all the features you're naming there about eyes on me and lockdown mode and easy controls over the devices because the classroom has become such a complicated place in this technological age.
Students all have these devices, and the devices were not designed for education purposes, right? They're designed for entertainment, for communication, for photography, for social media. When I hear you talk about how you're doing it, it's almost like reinventing what classroom technology should look like in a more integrated way.
You know, if you had a system in front of the kids and the teacher that's connected to the LMS connected to the SIS single point of contact, like you say, but it has all the, you know, has the functionality of paper and of screen, it feels like a real step change in trying to. Hodge together, the entertainment tech or you know, the consumer tech and the educational purpose.
Instead, it's sort of much more streamlined. It, you know, you mentioned earlier that your first startup was acquired by Nike and you know, you've seen similarly powerful partners with Jotit already. You've gotten investment from Owl Ventures. We talk about OWL a lot on the podcast, and you've partnered with.
Google absolute massive educational, you know, powerhouse what Ben says all the time, Google is the biggest education company, ed tech company in the world. Tell us about some of these partnerships and how you're expecting them to impact your future and accelerate Jot it's impact on the classroom.
[00:23:07] David Bleicher: So first of all, we're super happy about that and that's kind of, it's a reinforcement to what we're doing.
So when, when we get people who know education and have been in the space for much longer than we have. And they understand the vision that I'm trying to transmit to you guys here on this call. It's very encouraging. It gives us some power. It also accelerates our efforts a lot. So I will say two separate things.
First of all, our ventures, our ventures, you know, when an entrepreneur sits and prepares their next round of funding, they, they make their list of who they wanna work with. Number one on the list was our ventures. Now, how many times do you actually land the number one on your list? It's very rare. And, and so again, I'm super thankful and happy for this to happen, and since, you know, we we're, we're a couple of months into this partnership and the amount of connections we've received.
Through them, the amount of validation, the amount of people they've talked to, even before they invested though, they've just to validate, Jotit. They've talked to so many leaders in the school districts, in education, in other companies, et cetera. So it really is a force multiplier that is hard to imagine.
And Google for sure, I think I didn't mention that, but when we came into the space, we tried to map who are the players that we need to work with, who are the players that we need to respect? And who are our competitors? And so we made two conscious decisions. One is we're not gonna be a hardware company.
We're not gonna compete with other hardwares. And so Chromebook being Google is the strongest hardware player in the education space. And so we're working on most of these Chromebooks that have handwriting capability. And more and more of Chromebooks have stylist support, which is being standardized throughout the world.
And obviously the LMS. So again, a young entrepreneur coming in with excitement to their first journey will say, Hey, we're gonna replace the LMS, we're gonna be the, the center of learning for, we're gonna be the everything. And I think a much more mature approach that we took here was to say, Hey, we're gonna connect to any LMS Google Classroom, the number one LMS in the world.
That means two things. A, it means that we enhance, so now Google has an incentive to push Jotit forward. 'cause Jotit makes so much out of their things that are already selling instead of competing. That's been two conscious decisions that we've made and this is what allows us to make these partnerships.
And again, we, you know, we're, we're, we're super happy with that. It's, it's just, it's all brand new, it's all news from the past couple of months. So we really can't predict the future or how fast this will accelerate. Jot. I will, however say, more exciting than any of these calls. Like I just came off from a moment ago in talking to a teacher that tells me how a co-teacher of his was in London and managed their classroom from there and pushed thing, and kids were sitting with a replacement teacher in class and learning as usual, or stories about differentiations in the classroom.
There's so many stories and you know, for everyone in education, you're here for these stories much more than the, you know, the more I would say flashy names, et cetera. Thank you so much, David, for sharing those inspirational stories and you know, I think the one thing that we have seen is that things are changing and evolving super fast, but I think the most compelling thing we've taken from the Jotit story is just how we can I.
Go back to first principles of learning and reassess some of the trade-offs we've been making in EdTech in order to make learning come to life. If people wanna find out more about Jotit, how would they do that? David, they can go into our website, which is www.jotit.io. They can send me an email, which is David at jart io directly.
No problem at all. They can talk to one of our schools in the US fi find them, they're, you know, throughout the East coast or, you know, they'll find a way. There's not a problem. We're happy we're learning from all these conversations. I'd love to speak with anyone who's interested. If I can be a help or just collaborate, I'm always happy to.
Wonderful. Well, it's so great to have you as part of the EdTech community. David Bleecker, CEO of Jot. Thanks so much for joining EdTech Insiders. Thank you. Thank you both. Appreciate your time and appreciate the conversation.
[00:27:27] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community.
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