About Mr. Coleman

I didn't start out as a teacher.

Before I walked into a classroom, I spent 25 years building a career across some pretty different worlds — stockbroker, retail general manager, HR director, corporate safety director, regional sales manager, and digital marketing instructor. I managed teams, built businesses, passed my Series 7, ran HR from the ground up at a medical device startup, and spent nearly a decade managing service sales across the Pacific Northwest.

Then I became a teacher.

I earned my CTE credential from UCLA and started teaching Business Management, Marketing, and Financial Services at Tri-Valley ROP in Livermore, California. A few years later I added IB Business Management at Granada High School, teaching Standard Level and Higher Level courses to students preparing for one of the most rigorous academic programs in the world. I also teach an online Digital Marketing course through NuPaths in collaboration with Harrisburg University.

What I brought to the classroom wasn't a traditional teacher training background. It was 25 years of real-world experience in sales, marketing, human resources, finance, and business management. I knew my subjects inside and out. What I didn't have was ready-made curriculum to support what I needed to teach.

So I started building my own.

I had been an early adopter of almost every AI tool that came along — ChatGPT, MagicSchool, and everything in between. They all helped. None of them finished the job. They gave me lesson plans and text drafts and good ideas. And then I still had to build the actual lesson.

One day I was experimenting with AI and realized something was possible that none of the existing platforms were doing. I started building. I almost gave up too early — if I had refreshed the browser at the wrong moment, TeachSpark wouldn’t exist. I kept going.

After months of development and testing in my own classrooms, I released TeachSpark — an AI-powered lesson activity builder that generates complete, interactive, student-facing activities in about 5 minutes. Not a draft. Not a starting point. A finished lesson, ready to share.

The idea behind TeachSpark came from something I saw over and over in my own classroom: students don't all get there the same way. My IB Business Management students needed more than one way to practice the same concept before it actually clicked — they needed to see a problem from a few different angles.

The idea was simple: a teacher types in what they want to teach, and the engine builds an activity that lets students explore that concept from more than one angle — different ways to see the same problem, so they can practice it and actually grow their understanding, not just memorize it once.

I'm proud of where this has landed. I didn't expect TeachSpark to become what it is today, and getting here took a lot more work than I imagined when I started.

TeachSpark was never meant to be everything a classroom needs. It was built to do one thing well: give teachers a fast way to provide differentiated instruction for the different kinds of learners sitting in front of them every day.

A few of the small touches come from people, not just planning. I added Blooket support because I love Blooket, and so do my students. I added Common Core alignment because a good friend of mine teaches in a Common Core classroom, and I know how much it matters there.

TeachSpark was built by a teacher who lived the problem firsthand. It is built for every teacher who has ever woken up with a great idea for a lesson and not had the time to turn it into something real before class. If you're a teacher and you like the way TeachSpark works, let me know if there's something you'd like to see added — I'll see about doing it.

I built it because I needed it. I hope it helps you too.