Thank you for a successful Year

With the school year coming to a close for most of the U.S., Nic and I wanted to send a big thank you to all the Edmodo users that have helped make Edmodo a success. It has blown our mind since launching in September of 2008, 37,786 students and teachers have signed up for Edmodo, created 6,799 groups, and posted over 320,000 times.

I really don’t want to reflect that much on our past year as one’s past does not dictate the future. There are lots of exciting changes coming in Edmodo and that’s what I’m going talk about below.

Edmodo going forward

Nic has been hard at work coding version 3.0 which we hope to release in a few weeks so you will have a chance to play and get accustomed to it before the new school year starts in the fall.

The biggest change for the end-user is how replies are handled. Replies will be handled inline underneath posts instead of being treated as a new post and going to the top of the stream. If your familiar with comments on Facebook then you will have no problem adjusting to the new reply system on Edmodo. This has been our most frequent request since launching Edmodo.

The next biggest change is the right hand side panel for Alerts, Assignments, & Events with be going away in favor of a Spotlight area which will highlight anything new in your Edmodo stream, including replies, assignments, upcoming events, and more.

Edmodo 3.0

Another thing that you may notice is a much speedier experience. Nic has been hard at work on a new caching system that will eliminate the need to hit our database as much navigating your streams.

One question I have been asked a lot is how we are going to monetize. Edmodo is a free product without any advertising. Now is the time for us to begin answering this question. The Edmodo that you know and love will continue to be free, but we are going to be adding premium applications and features that will be able to be added on top of the free product. Our goal is start off with at least 3 premium applications for the fall and continue to add more throughout the year.

A full featured grade book application with export capabilities
An attendance application
A lesson planner which will automatically post assignments to edmodo when the date comes up
A simple group page where persistent resources and information can be stored
A quiz/testing applicication

We also want to release a version of Edmodo that individual schools and districts can purchase to integrate with their existing IT infrastructure.

Edmodo Goals for 2009-2010 school year

release Edmodo 3.0
release premium features
release a version schools can run on their own servers
release a web based mobile version
release a native iPhone application

June 7, 2009 | Filed Under general

Comments

Mark Isero

The 3.0 version and the premium applications sound really great! What about a post-to-blog feature for assignments/lesson plans? Or on the attendance application, a mechanism by which students are alerted that they were absent and should check out the homework? Will the grading application combine with the current turn-in feature so that a score is recorded at the same time I grade it? Great work.

Todd Norton

I have been a huge fan of your product and touts its awesomeness at any conference I attend. However, to fully implement it in our school, is there a way for a kid to be assigned to more than one class? Could a student be assigned to say 7 classes?

Jeff O'Hara

Todd, just an FYI, a student can be members of multiple groups/classes. Once they are an edmodo user all they have to do is click the "join" link in the left side where the groups are listed and enter a code for a group from another teacher.

isinglass

Hey guys. I've emailed you already but I haven't received an answer in days. How do you delete a student account?

Jeff O'Hara

I never got the e-mail, if you log into your account, go to the pencil icon next to your group you can click members and remove the student account from there.

Tim Courtney

Hey Jeff,

Where is the iPhone application on your roadmap? Will you be starting development on that soon?

Tim

Jeff O'Hara

We probably will not start working on it until the fall sometime.

brklynsurfer

I am very excited for Edomodo 3.0. I have tried using friendfeed for discussions inside and outside of class and I think edmodo will do a much better job this fall. I have spent the last week of school now searching for a replacement for engrade ( would randomly lose some data and no student profile). I am also looking for a replacement for my clipboard of attendance (mobile web app /ipod touch app). I would pay to have this all wrapped into the clean and clear design of edmodo. I just hope the two of you have not bitten off more than you can chew.

Jeff O'Hara

We are hard at work on 3.0 and is coming along quite nicely. I'm sure there we'll be a few bumps and bruises when we launch it, but that is why we are doing it over the summer. Once again thanks for choosing edmodo to use with your students. We appreciate it and the best thing you can do to help us out is tell your colleagues about us and your successes with us.

Al Delgado

Thank you for providing a service dedicated to staff and students! Love the clean interface and ease of use. Looking forward to the third version!

Patrick

Version 3.0 looks to be a nice improvement on 2.0. I especially am excited about the possibility of running Edmodo on my server. I'd say you guys are really headed in the right direction. Thanks for all you do.