Chalktips aims to make the college paper more engaging and entertaining

How It Works

Chalktips lets you seamlessly link web resources, such as photos, videos, and websites to text. Resources are annotated and organized into a booklet, which completes the college essay.

Gone are the text-heavy essays with long URL links for citations. Chalktips scrapes web pages for photos, so sources are presented graphically, while maintaining an essay's logic and organization.

Chalktips caters to the 21st century reader, writer, and student.

Professors have also used Chalktips as way for students and the professor to introduce themselves by publishing biographies. Small Pieces of My Life

In the beta version, students started publishing booklets that were not required assignments.

Chalktips takes the best out of social networking sites and implements it to assignments. As student publish more assignments, they build start building a portfolio of their work.

Open to Everyone

Unlike other education-centric classroom tools, anyone can create an account. There is no distinction between students and teachers. Users follow each other, anyone who publishes a booklet is an editor, and anyone can comment.

Co-founder and sociology professor Marianne Navada: "my goal is to get professionals to see how our courses can apply to real world needs. I want to open up the classroom, and free the college essay. Our site fosters collaboration and meaningful discussion, from students, professors, and people outside of the classroom. The traditional essay assignment hasn't evolved--it's still a conversation between the teacher and the student and Chalktips hopes to address that problem."

Chalktips was launched September 2012. In one class where it was beta tested, 2 student film makers were so enthusiastic about the idea, that they created a short documentary about the founders, problems in education, and Chalktips. The Learning Curve