ETEC 522 – May 2012

Edmodo: Nic Borg & Jeff O’Hara

Nic Borg (above, top) and Jeff O’Hara (above, bottom)are the co-founders of Edmodo, an online classroom management system based on social media.  The two young men worked for two different school districts and while Mr. O’Hara was working in an IT position he found that schools were constantly needing social networking sites to be blocked from their students.  This led them to start work on Edmodo.

Edmodo is visually much like Facebook, but can be used for discussions as a class or in small groups, assignments, and day to day classroom management.  The interface is simple and user friendly, allowing teachers to easily make posts to the entire class, groups, or individuals.  Assignments can be shared similarly and can then be graded online.  Overall, the site offers a myriad of options for managing a classroom online!  The original goal of the project was to provide a tool that was easy to use, but useful for teachers and one that would not cause the same ‘problems’ as many other social networking options.

The motivation of Borg and O’Hara stems from their own experiences in the teaching field, which gives credibility to their project.  Their backgrounds in IT also provide them with the requisite skills to create such a project.  At the same time, however, it does not appear that they had a wealth of business knowledge at the start of their venture.  They now have a strong team of leaders in Edmodo (visit their about page for more info) and list their key investors.  They seem to be a very open company with strong support and a diverse leadership base.

On a personal level it is interesting to see success being achieved by two employees in a school district who thought that there needed to be something better for teachers, students and classrooms.  They saw the need, got to work, and now have a successful company with countless teachers benefiting from their work, including myself!