Mfarhanonline Social Media News: Facebook touts its “social graph,” Twitter has established something of an “interest graph” and now education startup Edmodo wants to create a “classroom graph,” too. On Tuesday, the K-12 social tool announced it would be expanding its Facebook-like platform to include third-party apps. As with Facebook and Twitter, Edmodo’s apps use the platform’s existing relationship map to make their developers’ services easier to access. They integrate with Edmodo’s dashboard — posting, for instance, badges to a student’s profile or grades to his teacher’s gradebook. Apps range from simple modules like a virtual graphing calculator to complex systems like a multi-player social math game . For teachers to give their classes access to an app, they’ll pay anywhere between $10 and $100 (Edmodo itself is free to use) . Each app is also available as a standalone product, but the hope is that partnering with Edmodo helps get new technologies into classrooms. Edmodo’s four-year-old social classroom dashboard already has at least one user at 70,000 schools across the country. Teachers use it to manage their classes, conduct class discussions, post additional information and communicate with students and parents. Because teachers have already set up their classes on Edmodo, apps that plug into it don’t have to ask which students are in which classes. Edmodo also gives these services exposure to classrooms, which is no easy feat. K-12 schools have a reputation for reluctance when it comes to new technologies, and marketing directly to individual teachers is quite a resource-heavy task for most startups. Edmodo has just launched a single portal through which any educational company can be discovered by teachers across the country. Sure, it charges a transa! ction fe e for this access, but for many education startups, the fee is well worth the visibility. The startup’s CEO and co-founder, Nic Borg, envisions the platform and its apps becoming the online hub for classrooms, similar to how Facebook has become an online hub for social lives. “It really becomes home base where all the content is being shared,” he says. “Instead of handing out paper now, they're using Edmodo.” Teachers using Edmodo can give specific students assignments from a variety of third-party online applications and observe progress in all of those apps from one place. That’s not something they can do with Facebook (and most K-12 schools block access to the mainstream social network). Nor is it something they can do with other classroom tools such as Collaborize Classroom . While Edmodo is starting out with just 35 apps, its open API proposes a promising solution to the problem of integrating new technologies into classrooms. “We're hoping to generate a situation where publishers have access to classrooms and teachers can instantly implement new technologies,” Borg says. Image courtesy of iStockphoto , RichVintage More About: edmodo , education For more Business coverage: Follow Mfarhanonline Business on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Business channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad Social Media reviews series maintain by Mayya
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