Archive for Education

Online Collaboration

Democrasoft, Inc. today announced management updates in three areas of interest to the financial community and shareholders:

(1) The last of the legacy patent sales has been completed. U.S. patent #05262875 (also known as the “Mincer” patent) was sold for $50,000 net to the Company in a post-auction transaction through ICAP/Ocean Tomo, the same auction house that sold the rest of the Company’s legacy patents earlier this year.  This concludes the process of monetizing the Company’s legacy patent portfolio and does not affect the pending patent applications related to the Company’s Collaborize cloud-based social networking platform.

(2) At last week’s Annual Meeting of Shareholders, all of the Company’s Directors were re-elected.

(3) As a result of ongoing marketing activities, including the Company’s previously announced participation at ISTE 2011 education technology conference in Philadelphia last week and the previously announced appearance of CEO Richard Lang on the Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC on June 24, new Collaborize Classroom sites launched last week were the highest weekly total since the Company announced the free online learning platform. The number of launched sites increased from 5,274 on Friday, June 24 to 6,380 at the end of the day on Friday, July 1, 2011 even though schools are generally not in session.

“We are extremely gratified by the growth of the Collaborize Classroom sites launched by teachers,” said Richard Lang, Democrasoft’s Chairman & CEO.  “We are very hopeful that, as we launch our global Topic Library and other important new elements of Collaborize Classroom within the education community over the coming weeks, our teacher network will continue to expand to even greater numbers.”

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Democrasoft, Inc. today announced that it will be releasing an important evolutionary extension to its rapidly expanding Collaborize Classroom platform for online education. The Company is poised to unveil the Collaborize Classroom Topic Library™, a vast repository of individual, pre-formatted “learning units” created by and for teachers. The Topic Library will allow teachers everywhere to share individual question-based topics used to engage students online, that have already proven successful in individual Collaborize Classroom websites around the world.

With just a few clicks, teachers will be able to populate their own Collaborize Classroom websites with individual discussion topics from the global Topic Library on almost any subject, or be able to share their own discussion topics with other teachers on the Collaborize Classroom network. Additionally, the new Topic Library will provide real-time ratings and comments from other teachers who have already used these topics, creating an unparalleled peer-review system for assessing the relevance and potential value of any topic in the library.

Collaborize Classroom Topic Library

According to Democrasoft, Chairman & CEO Richard Lang, “What is exciting about this new extension of Collaborize Classroom is that the Topic Library will it make it possible for any teacher in the world to benefit from the success of other teachers. And like our basic platform, it will remain free of charge for all teachers.”

The new Topic Library builds exponentially on Collaborize Classroom’s award-winning online learning platform, which has been been exeriencing rapid growth and glowing reviews from teachers, students and independent organizations since its official launch in January of this year. Teachers who have previously launched their own private and secure Collaborize Classroom websites have reported significant improvements in student engagement, depth of learning, and test scores. The new Topic Library will allow teachers to share the individual topics that have had the most success in their own Collaborize Classrooms around the world.

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 multi-media directly into discussion topics. The collaborative online learning platform also provides student participation reports and quantified results of online student discussions, further supporting a new depth of learning, as reported by teachers already using the platform.

Beginning later this summer, once teachers launch discussion topics on their own private Collaborize Classroom sites, they will be given the opportunity to post their topics to the shared Topic Library. Any educator will be able to easily search through all of the pre-formated question-based topics, sorted by subject, grade, custom tags, or even by the author of the topic.

According to Lang, “The new Topic Library is designed to provide two huge benefits: It allows newer teachers to benefit from the work of more experienced teachers around the world and it makes it possible for any teacher in the world to rise to prominence as a provider of effective, successful topics that have been validated by peers world-wide. All this in just a few, simple clicks.“

The new Collaborize Classroom Topic Library is scheduled to be released in time for the beginning of the fall school semester.

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May
27

The Process of Global Innovation

Posted by: Shana Ray | Comments (0)

At the end of April, our VP and General Manager, Colt Briner was asked to be a part of the opening keynote panel to speak about Global Innovation in Education at the Georgetown Global Forum in San Francisco.  Joining him onstage was Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO of LivingSocial, Chris Kelly, founder of Kelly Investments and Former Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook and moderated by John J. DeGioia, President, Georgetown University.

“More than just 21st century buzzwords, social entrepreneurship and global education are the building blocks of an international discourse surrounding the future of economic growth and develop.”

Colt discussed innovation in education and how blended learning can help reach students in this new global world: The hottest term in education is Differentiation.  We have come to understand that people learn things in many different ways. Reading and listening to a lecture is just one slice of the education pie.

The way that people interact with information is so diverse and the technologies that are coming out each day make it possible to reach students through their best method, through their strengths.

You can teach anything through these (blended learning) methods.

I am excited when I see teachers approaching students in different ways, giving them opportunities and giving the students the “power of the playbook” – where students have the capacity  (whether learning online or other ways) to stop, rewind, go back, fast-forward and review their homework so they can truly understand it.

Technology is what makes this possible and I would love to see more teachers explore this in their classes.

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ISTE 2011, the nation’s largest educational technology conference is coming up in a few months.  This year marks the first year the team at Collaborize Classroom will have a booth (#2361) during the June 27-29th event in Philadelphia, PA, and we couldn’t be more excited to attend.

ISTE 2011 Conference | Collaborize Classroom

We have created a whole website dedicated to updates about ISTE 2011 including:

We look forward to meeting many Twitter friends and online faces in person at the event!

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One thing that we keep hearing from teachers who are hesitant to get started using an online learning platform with their students is that they are not sure how where to start in an online space.  We created Collaborize Classroom to be an easy-to-use site and have created teaching resources and lesson plans to help remove this barrier.

Recently, we added some of these lesson plans and resources to the Scholastic website.

Collaborize Classroom | Scholastic Teachers

We created a press release announcing our free lesson plans for teachers on PitchEngine.com, you can read it below.

————————————-

Democrasoft, Inc., the creator of Collaborize Classroom, a free online learning platform, today announced a collection of teaching resources and lesson plans, available to all K-12 teachers via Scholastic.com.

Democrasoft will provide free teaching resources and lesson plans on how to best incorporate educational technology designed to foster online collaboration in the classroom. The resources, produced by educators, include: best practices for facilitating online student communication and subject-specific lesson plans to complement in-class discussions. Teachers can access resources and sign up for a free Collaborize Classroom site at http://Scholastic.com/CollaborizeClassroom.

Democrasoft’s flagship product, Collaborize Classroom, is a free online learning platform that allows teachers to extend their classroom discussions to a structured and private online community. With Collaborize Classroom, students can expand on discussions, assignments and instruction and collaborate online, allowing for deeper participation and engagement, inside and outside the classroom. Thousands of teachers have already signed up for the free platform, which takes less than five minutes to set up.

By making resources available to the million of teachers who are part of the Scholastic.com community, Democrasoft introduces more teachers to the benefits of this online learning platform. By integrating Collaborize Classroom into their respective classrooms, teachers can quickly and easily make online discussions a successful part of their teaching approach, which will save up to two to three hours a week in grading time and up to $90 a month in copying and paper costs, while simultaneously increasing student engagement.

“We are excited about being able to extend Collaborize Classroom to the teaching community on Scholastic.com,” said Richard Lang, Democrasoft Chairman & CEO. “We have worked hand-in-hand with teachers to create this amazing solution and now it is very gratifying to see its use expanding across the country.”

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