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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.
Entrepreneur Interview: Richard Lang, Democrasoft, Inc.
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Richard Lang, Democrasoft Chairman & CEO, was recently featured in two articles.
The Business Info Guide featured Richard on their resource website for entrepreneurs - Entrepreneur Interview: Richard Lang, Democrasoft, Inc. In the article, Richard discussed Democrasoft’s turn into the educational technology industry, the rewards he has gotten out of 20 years of being an entrepreneur in the technology industry and also gives some advice to others looking to run their own business.
What does Democrasoft do?
We provide private and public social networking platforms for groups with a common purpose. We are a leading provider of social collaboration and voting platforms for building online communities. We are dedicated to facilitating a vision of online “social networking with purpose.”
Our flagship product, Collaborize Classroom is a free online learning platform that is designed to complement classroom instruction and engages students in online activities, assignments and discussions that allow for deeper participation inside and outside the classroom.
Was there a specific turning point when you realized your business was moving to the next level?
Collaborize Classroom, our free online learning platform in the education space, was really created by teachers who adapted our original Collaborize platform for their own use. When we saw how perfectly the platform could be adapted for Education, we focused our attention on it and customized it for teachers, based on their valuable input.
In the Press Democrat article, Local software firms seek to revolutionize education, Richard was quoted ,“Education software builds on social networking, but it has the potential to do more. It’s teaching our kids 21st century skills, including how to have respectful conversations.”
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.
