Archive for Collaborize
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.
Democrasoft Enters Into Stock Purchase Agreement With Its Developer
Posted by: | CommentsDemocrasoft, Inc. announced that it has entered into an agreement with Innominds, Inc., of San Jose, CA, the central technology developer assigned to the creation of Democrasoft’s Collaborize platform for group collaboration, to issue up to $150,000 of Democrasoft common stock at $1.00 per share for a like amount of Innominds services.
Through its affiliate in India, Innominds has been providing development services to Democrasoft at a rate in the mid-six figures annually since the development project began, and the parties expect that rate to ramp up over the next year as Democrasoft expands the capabilities of its platform. The $150,000 development investment by Innominds represents only a portion of the expenditures planned with Innominds in the coming months.
Democrasoft also announced that its online “collaborative education” offering, Collaborize Classroom, recently won the Outstanding Achievement Award in Education from the Interactive Media Council, scoring in the top 14 of approximately 140 submissions.
The number of teachers launching Collaborize Classroom sites has been growing at a compounded monthly rate of more than 30% since October 2010.
“While the amount of this investment by Innominds is relatively small, it will still help us offset the additional development costs associated with our planned expansion of features and capabilities,” said Richard Lang, Chairman and CEO of Democrasoft. “When we jointly explored the options for collaboration and closely aligning our interests, Democrasoft gave this investment favorable consideration. Both parties are excited about the possibilities that are emerging.”
In addition to serving as the primary development arm of Democrasoft, Innominds is also a Collaborize reseller in India. According to Divakar Tantravahi, Managing Director of Innominds, “We are very impressed with the potential of the Collaborize platform. Our relationship with Democrasoft is an example of the added value we can bring to all our customers, beyond our product engineering services. We are looking forward to continued success working together.”
Social Media for Social Good
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Please join Colt Briner and myself TONIGHT at the inaugural meeting of the Social Media Club, Silicon Valley. 6:30pm at the PayPal Headquarters in San Jose.
Hosted in PayPal’s Town Hall Room and sponsored by eBay Developers Program, the meeting will feature a moderated discussion of “Social Media for Social Good”.
Program director, Dan Holden blogged this morning about tonight’s event saying: “It’s a group of individuals from a variety of backgrounds who “get it” that social media can benefit meaningful causes.”
Louis Gray, vice president of marketing at My6Sense, and a well-known commentator on social media tools and trends, will moderate a top-notch panel including:
- Colt Briner, vice president and general manager of Democrasoft and co-creator of Collaborize Classroom. Colt Briner has been working to create technology for a better society since 2003. He also volunteers his time as a director at the Virtual Country Foundation, a California-based nonprofit exploring ways to use technology to improve democratic participation in businesses.
- Chris Wilder, executive director of the Valley Medical Center Foundation. Chris is an avid social media user who regularly blogs in support of the foundation’s important work on behalf of Santa Clara County’s largest public hospital.
- Stephanie Woehrmann, actress, press director, teacher, social media aficionado for El Teatro Campesino. Resident Musical Director of El Teatro Campesino since 2006, she has produced, written and composed many musicals, plays and actos for El Teatro Campesino.
- Judy Chang, Senior Manager of Vertical Markets for PayPal.
- Charlie Treadwell is Corporate Affairs Marketing manager in Cisco’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program.
Attendees are welcome and pay $20 cash at the door! Tweet with us at @WisdomofWe, @ShanaatDS or @smc_sv.
Rick Smolan Elected to Democrasoft Board
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New York and Sausalito-based entrepreneur, publisher and photographer Rick Smolan has been elected to the Democrasoft Board of Directors, bringing the number of directors to five.
Smolan, who has owned shares of the company for nearly ten years, is best known as the creator of the “Day in the Life” series of coffee table books. His corporation, Against All Odds Productions, Inc., specializes in the design and execution of large-scale global projects that combine compelling storytelling with state-of-the-art technology. Many of his books have been New York Times best-sellers and have been featured on the covers of Time, Newsweek, Fortune and U.S. News and World Report. Today more than five million of his books adorn coffee tables around the world; titles include America at Home, UK at Home, 24 Hours in Cyberspace, The Power to Heal, Passage to Vietnam, One Digital Day, From Alice to Ocean and the award-winning Blue Planet Run. Fortune Magazine selected Against All Odds as “One of the 25 Coolest Companies in America.”
Smolan has been a pioneer in the world of global crowd-sourced projects and employing practical new uses of technology, including orchestrating the Internet’s largest real time international poll (The Planet Project), the first commercialization of custom cover technology (America 24/7), creating the first book to include an award winning interactive CD-ROM (From Alice to Ocean) and producing the first large-scale solely custom published coffee table book (The Obama Time Capsule).
Because all of his projects have been made possible through collaboration with corporate sponsors, Smolan is extremely familiar with the benefits of sponsor funding, one of the monetization options being employed with Democrasoft’s Collaborize Classroom product.
“Our schools and our teachers are being challenged by budget constraints every day,” Smolan said. “I’m very excited to be working with Democrasoft to bring its Collaborize Classroom online learning platform to hundreds of thousands of kids across the country, in part through the use of Democrasoft’s unique sponsorship model.” A frequent guest on television programs including The Today Show, Martha Stewart, Good Morning America and similar programs, Smolan has recruited sponsorships from Fortune 500 companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, Intel, Hewlett Packard, eBay, IKEA, Kodak, Federal Express and Adobe.
“Rick will bring a wonderful new dimension to our Board,” CEO Richard Lang noted. “He knows how to create practical uses for new technologies and he knows how to make a profit — both very helpful traits. We are very excited that he will be active in helping to enhance our shareholder value by making our Collaborize products successful.”
To see the official Rick Smolan Press Release on Market Wire, please visit http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Rick-Smolan-Elected-to-Democrasoft-Board-1382067.html.
Playing with Fire and Trust at TedX
Posted by: | CommentsOur VP & General Manager (and accomplished illusionist), Colt Briner, spoke at a local Tedx event last November. The theme for TEDxConstitutionDrive was ”Trust” and Colt showed the audience how to trust themselves, try new things and believe.
