These paddles are just fine by school kids
Special to The Bee
Published Tuesday, Jun. 09, 2009
Students smile and clap when teacher Dan Harris tells them: “It’s paddle time!”
No, no one spiked the water fountains at Caroline Wenzel Elementary School in Sacramento. As it turns out, the “paddles” that Harris hands out to his second-graders aren’t for discipline. They are whiteboard paddles the kids use to write on – the brainchild of Sonora inventor Julia Rhodes.
The paddles are a low-tech solution to a problem nearly every teacher in California faces: how to make learning more interactive without the expense of buying each student a computer.
“Some shy kids might not ever raise their hands in class. With the paddles, everyone participates, and kids love them,” Harris said, noting that the dry-erase markers attach to the paddles so they don’t get misplaced.
Looking out at a sea of paddles, Harris can quickly scan the class to see who understands and who needs help. The paddles save him hours in test-correcting time and about $200 a year in paper.
Even better, Harris said: “Students’ math and spelling scores went up.”
Rhodes, president of KleenSlate Concepts in Sonora, invented the paddles in 2006 as an addition to her existing dry-erase product line. She’ll talk about her business today at Women in Business 2009 at the Hilton San Francisco Hotel and the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Her first product was an eraser cap for dry-erase markers, which she invented while working as an eighth-grade English teacher at Sonora Elementary School.
“The eraser was never around or was too big to correct small mistakes,” she said. “You wouldn’t buy a pencil without an eraser. I thought there had to be a better way.”
Rhodes invented, patented and manufactured the first eraser for dry-erase markers in 2001. Since then, KleenSlate sales have grown to more than $1 million a year from $36,000 that first year. Her products are used in schools all over the world.
To help launch her KleenSlate Dry Erase product line, Rhodes attended an inventors conference wearing a dress she crafted out of peel-and-stick whiteboard material. When a talent scout for “The Tonight Show” went around the room, he was impressed by the clever dress on which she had written with one of her markers: PICK ME.
He did, and Rhodes ended up on “The Tonight Show” in 2004 in Jay Leno’s segment “Inventing Across America.”
When she first started researching the market for her products, Rhodes said someone told her a woman with a single product couldn’t sell it to retailers without a man accompanying her.
Rhodes, a self-proclaimed rule-breaker, said, “So I cut out a man’s head from a sheet of whiteboard, glued it to a Popsicle stick and brought him with me to my first meeting with retailers.”
That’s what gave her the idea for her next product, the KleenSlate Paddle, which won Learning Magazine’s Teacher’s Choice Award last year.
Still a teacher at heart, Rhodes enjoys visiting classrooms to tell kids how she patented and sold her ideas and lets them know they can become inventors, too.
At the end of a recent visit, students wrote “thank you” on their paddles, waved them in the air and cheered.
“I felt like a rock star,” Rhodes said.