One result of this teacher-to-teacher network has been the rise of viral educational materials on Edmodo. "I want all the other third grade teachers in my school or in the district where I can connect with them, share ideas, and get best practices I can instantly implement with my classroom." "If I'm teaching third graders," Hutter says. They can connect one-on-one or in teacher-only groups focused on particular subject areas, and for the past three years, Edmodo has run an annual conference that brings together teachers from around the world using streaming video. Since her arrival, Edmodo has added tools that let school and district administrators to do basic account management and track use of the service.īut, at the same time, the company has also worked to help teachers communicate with each other. First as COO then as CEO, Hutter has helped reconcile the ad hoc, grassroots spirit of Edmodo with the buttoned-down realities of the education system. They can also receive broadcast messages from their child's teacher.Īs the network took off, Edmodo brought on Crystal Hutter, a former Oracle engineer and investment manager at eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's Omidyar Network. Parents can create accounts and follow what their students are working on and where they might be struggling. Meanwhile, students can talk to their whole classroom as part of a group, or one-one with teachers, but not directly to each another. They can also create interactive quizzes and share educational content such as videos. Teachers can use the system to issue assignments to students and to accept completed assignments digitally.
Young children were barred from such systems, which, in any case, didn't provide the privacy and moderation systems you'd want in a classroom setting.Īvailable on the web, iPhones, iPads, and Android devices, Edmodo became a social network that connects teachers to students and, to a lesser extent, parents. Meanwhile, outside of education, social systems like Facebook and LinkedIn were flourishing by connecting people and evolving in tandem with their online habits.
Teachers weren't learning from one another, and the software they used wasn't improving based on usage patterns. The other big problem: most educational software programs and the data they generated was isolated. >'Everyone talks about the power and the transformation that data and technology can bring to the classroom, but it was all fragmented into 1,000 lonely islands.' Primary and secondary school teachers simply don't have that option and needed software that was more flexible, allowing a teacher to slow the pace of learning if a class was struggling with the material.
Part of the problem was schools were using software designed for higher education, where students are left behind if they don't keep up.
Borg and co-founder Jeff O'Hara were inspired to create Edmodo by their own work in public schools, where they saw web apps and other systems that had no real impact on the classroom.