Founders-Nic Borg and Jeff O’Hara
Nic Borg and Jeff O’Hara founded Edmodo in 2008 in San Mateo, California. They are an example of intrapreneurs. Both worked within school districts as IT specialists and felt a need to disrupt the system and allow teachers and students to remain connected while in school while many schools and districts elsewhere were limiting these connections.
The key executives of Edmodo have significant experience as senior management of different education ventures and therefore Edmodo is under solid leadership moving forward. The development team behind Edmodo are all or were once teachers. This is a key for Edmodo to connect to educators. Anyone who is part of the Edmodo team is able to answer questions from educators as many if not all have been in the classroom. This is important for the development of Edmodo as a viable product that will enhance learning from a teacher’s perspective.
Edmodo is Learning Management System (LMS) that connects students and teachers in a safe environment. It is designed to be familiar to students as the platform is very similar to Facebook and therefore is easy to use for both students and teachers. Edmodo allows teachers to share and post documents, connect to other educators, host class discussions, reward students with badges as well as allowing students to use different apps for learning. It is meant to engage students in an online learning environment.
I myself, and others in my PSE experienced some features of Edmodo, and I am in favour of that great online free platform and rich resource.
Even though, Edmodo lacks some of the course management features compared to other LMS platforms, it has enough for basic primarily K 4-12 learning management. Moreover, Edmodo recently opened its platform to outside developers, so it will surely become better in the future. I definitely recommend everybody to try it.
Milorad
As stated on Edmodo’s website, they are the number 1 social learning network in the world. Once again, originating in Silicon Valley seems to foster innovation and success. It now has over 56 million users. It would have been good to see their start up pitch rather than just exploring an already successful company. I do like the idea it brings parents into the connective team, not only students and teachers.