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Over 1.1 Million “Lessons Served” to Students on Collaborize Classroom
Posted by: | CommentsDemocrasoft today announced a major milestone development related to Collaborize Classroom, the company’s flagship collaborative education platform. The company announced that more than 1.1 million individual topic-based lessons have been delivered to students since the official launch of Collaborize Classroom in January of 2011.
Collaborize Classroom has been steadily gaining recognition and high marks from teachers, students, and the education and technology industries. Collaborize Classroom, is available to all grade levels, and provides the ability to extend in-class conversations into private and secure online sites that are accessible with any Internet browser. Teachers post topic-based lessons on any subject in their own Collaborize Classrooms and invite their students to participate after school. Each time a new student receives a new lesson for the first time, it is counted as one “lesson served”. Lessons served on Collaborize Classroom have been increasing by about 5,000 per day, and are to be expected to top 1.5 million by the end of next month.
“Reaching this important milestone is important for us because it validates, for us and for the education and technology industries, that Collaborize Classroom is being recognized as an effective way of delivering curriculum to students outside of the classroom,” says Richard Lang, CEO of Democrasoft. “It not only improves student engagement significantly, but it also makes teachers’ jobs easier and more effective.”
One of the keys to successfully being able to deliver well over a million lessons to students in the past year has been the recently created Collaborize Classroom Topic Library. This free global repository of topic-based lessons enables teachers to share the best and most effective individual lessons that they create with other teachers around the world. This sharing capability includes a peer-rating system and enables teachers to easily find the most interesting and appropriate lessons for their own students. With just a few clicks, any topic on any number of subjects from the Collaborize Classroom Topic Library can be copied to any Collaborize Classroom anywhere in the world, at any grade level. To date, more than 16,500 teachers worldwide have launched their own Collaborize Classroom sites, sustaining a 25% average monthly growth rate since January of last year. All of this momentum has been is getting noticed. Collaborize Classroom has recently added two top education awards to its growing list of awards in educational technology. District Administration Magazine named Collaborize Classroom one of its Readers’ Choice Top 100 Products for 2011. While Edudemic.com readers chose Collaborize Classroom as one of the Top 100 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools (http://collaborizeclassroom.com/blog).
“These awards are particularly satisfying because they originate from teachers themselves,” said Lang. “These are the actual teachers deriving the benefits of Collaborize Classroom first-hand, so when they select us as a “top tool,” it means a lot.”
The company also announced today that Collaborize Classroom is featured in a short documentary video that was recently released by GOOD Magazine on its online site. Entitled “Sharing the Wisdom of We,” the video highlights Collaborize Classroom’s contribution to education. It is part of the magazine’s series entitled “Future Learning,” featuring visionaries in the field of education technology.
Good Video: Sharing the Wisdom of We in the Classroom
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A few months back, the team from GOOD Magazine came out to our headquarters in Santa Rosa, CA to interview our CEO, Richard Lang, about what Collaborize Classroom is doing to create a more collaborative environment in the classroom.
“In my view, the future of learning has to blend down to the one obvious word, and that’s collaboration. No one of us knows as much as all of us. We refer to that as the “Wisdom of We.” – Richard Lang
“People can share ideas that they may not have felt comfortable sharing in class.” – Tucker, high school student using Collaborize Classroom
The video is part of GOOD’s Future Learning video series about technology in the classroom. Other videos include an interview with Sal Khan of the Khan Academy as well as other forward-thinking innovators like Digita Tabula, Innovations in Learning, and Connexions. The whole series is part of a longer film on Innovators in Education (aka “Eduvators”) and is in the works to be released in 2012.
Sebastopol-based entrepreneur and global media executive John Kilcullen has been elected to the Democrasoft Board of Directors, bringing the number of directors to six.
An accomplished CEO and award-winning entrepreneur, Kilcullen is best known for creating and publishing the popular “For Dummies” brand of how-to books, which has gone on to sell over 250 million copies in 29 languages generating over $2 billion in retail sales and numerous New York Times, Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek bestsellers. Under his leadership, IDG Books Worldwide grew from $0 to $240 million in 10 years. He took the company public in 1998 and sold it three years later to John Wiley and Sons.
As President and Publisher of 115 year old Billboard magazine, Kilcullen architected the turnaround of a legacy music brand and subsequently was promoted to run the music & literary, as well as the film & performing arts groups including The Hollywood Reporter, Backstage and CineAsia.
Kilcullen has received numerous awards including Ernst and Young’s 1999 Entrepreneur of the Year. He was a member of Advertising Age’s 1995 Marketing 100 award and was recognized as a key influencer on FOLIO’s annual Folio 40 list and MIN Magazine’s 21 Most Intriguing People in 2006. He was also named a recipient of the Irish America Business 100 award in 1999 and 2003.
Kilcullen has been profiled in Forbes, People, The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today and in two books: Lead Like an Entrepreneur and The Rebel Rules. He has appeared on CNBC, CNN and popular talk shows in Australia, Canada, Singapore and the UK.
“Democrasoft has an exciting vision to leverage its cloud-based, social collaboration and e-commerce tools in a variety of fast growing vertical markets, starting with education,” said Kilcullen. “As an education entrepreneur and brand builder, I am delighted to assist the Democrasoft team in making that compelling vision a reality.”
According to Democrasoft CEO Richard Lang, “John Kilcullen brings a wealth of valuable perspective and contacts to our company, precisely at the time we are beginning to interface with publishers in the world of educational content and curriculum.”
“John is great fit for our Board and we expect a great collaboration in the coming months and beyond. We are very excited that he will be active in helping us with both strategic planning and growth management as we continue to implement our business plan,” said Lang.
Democrasoft Announces Three Collaborize Classroom Milestones
Posted by: | CommentsDemocrasoft, Inc. today announced three milestone developments related to Collaborize Classroom, the company’s flagship web-based education platform. Democrasoft announced (1) the official launch of the revolutionary Collaborize Classroom Topic Library; (2) that over 10,000 teachers worldwide have launched their own Collaborize Classroom sites and (3) a newly redesigned CollaborizeClassroom.com.
Today marks the official launch of Democrasoft’s Collaborize Classroom Topic Library, a free community resource that enables teachers to take the best individual topic-based lessons that they create and share them with other teachers around the world. All teachers using Collaborize Classroom will now gain access to topics that have already proven successful for other teachers utilizing the free Collaborize Classroom online learning platform. The click-and-go curriculum functionality makes it possible for teachers to easily populate their own Collaborize Classroom sites in a matter of minutes, with individual discussion topics and lessons from the global Topic Library, on almost any subject and for any grade level, at no cost. Teachers can also share the discussion topics that they create with other teachers on the Collaborize Classroom network, providing the foundation for a 24 x 7 global repository of peer-reviewed topic-based lessons.
According to Democrasoft Chairman & CEO Richard Lang, “We believe that the introduction of our groundbreaking Topic Library has the potential to revolutionize how education is delivered around the world, and, while the library is already well-stocked, we look forward to an exponentially increasing number of topic-based lessons becoming available to educators everywhere, as teachers continue to share their most successful work.”
Collaborize Classroom also announced the achievement of another key milestone goal this week: more 10,000 teachers worldwide have now launched their own Collaborize Classroom sites. The number of sites launched by teachers has been growing by at least 34% per month since January of this year, except for June and July, when the adoption rate increased by 60% in those months.
“We are extremely gratified to see the adoption of Collaborize Classroom continue to climb,” said Lang. “We have gone from nine teachers using our free online learning platform last October to over 10,000 today, and we expect today’s launch of our global Topic Library to further enhance our adoption rate in the coming months and beyond.”
Democrasoft also announced that the company’s central Collaborize Classroom website has been redesigned and now contains new features to further help teachers engage their students in the learning process. CollaborizeClassroom.com features new sections containing (1) free teacher resources, (2) free professional development courses, and (3) on-demand webinars.
Collaborize Classroom has emerged as a preferred choice in education technology because of its simple and engaging design, its ease of use, the “fun factor” reported by students, and its ability to embed documents, video and other multimedia directly into online discussion topics.
The free, collaborative online learning platform also provides teachers with student participation reports, and teachers using the system have found the quantified results of online student discussions very helpful. In fact, last week, the company received the following unsolicited thank-you note from a teacher in New Jersey, even before the official introduction of the Topic Library: “Beginning my 20th year next week and this ol’ dog is so psyched about this site and the possibilities! Thanks for such an amazing new strategy for my teacher toolbox.”
Collaborize Classroom Updates – Groups and the Topic Library
Posted by: | CommentsToday we released the latest and greatest updates to Collaborize Classroom. As many of you know, last month the Collaborize Classroom Topic Library launched. With a single click, teachers can share individual question-based topics that have already been proven successful in individual Collaborize Classroom websites around the world. If you haven’t yet checked out the library you can here: http://library.collaborizeclassroom.com.
This month we’ve added some long-awaited features to Collaborize Classroom:
Permission-Based Categories
We’re excited to have delivered the feature that has been most requested by our users! You can now set group-level permissions on your topic categories. The benefit of this feature is that students will only see the topics that are relevant to them.
To use this feature, start by creating student groups. Roll over Manage at the top of your site and click Groups.
The Manage Groups section will appear, which lists all of the groups you have created in your site. To set up a new group, click Create New Group.
Once you’ve created your groups you can set permissions on any category so that it is only visible to members of the group(s) you select.
On the Manage Categories screen (the second tab in the “Manage Site” area), you’ll see the current visibility setting for each category. Collaborize Classroom defaults the setting to “Visible to Everyone.”
Click Edit and the Category Visibility window will appear. You have the choice to make the category you’ve selected visible to everyone, just the site moderators or the site moderators and the groups of your choice. Check the box(s) for the groups that apply and click Save Changes.
No Email Required for Student Registration
Another request we’ve heard from many of our users is for students to be able to join a Collaborize Classroom site without using an email address. With this release, we provide a link on the registration form for students to register without an email address:
If your students choose to create a username, it must be at least 6 characters in length. Just like an email address, they’ll use their new username to sign in to your Collaborize Classroom site.
Easy Access to Managing Categories
We’ve heard from many of our users that they were having a hard time finding where to go to manage their categories. To address this, we’ve added a simple way to navigate to the Manage Categories section. On the top right of the Categories list, you’ll see a pencil icon. Simply click on the pencil and the Manage Category section will appear. From this menu, you can add, delete, edit and rearrange categories. You can also set your visibility permissions using student groups, as described above in Permission-Based Categories.
We are always looking for feedback from our community of teachers. If you have an idea, feature request, or anything else you would like to share, please send it to us at feedback@collaborizeclassroom.com or find us on Twitter at @Collaborize.
