Now 18M Users Strong, Edmodo Makes Its First Acquisition In Root-1 To Become The App Market For Education
After spending years working as technicians at public schools, Jeff O’Hara and Nicolas Borg launched Edmodo in 2008 to address what they had come to see as a huge gap in the teacher-student relationship: The need for a better, safer way for teachers to connect and communicate with their students. However, with the launch of its APIs early last year to allow developers to build apps on top of its platform, what began as a social networking tool — a sort of Facebook or Yammer for education — has more recently evolved into a marketplace for education apps.
Like a growing number of students, Ben Kosinski attended multiple universities over the course of his collegiate career. Although these schools differed wildly in culture and the makeup of their student bodies, the one thing that seems to remain true at any school, he says, is the level of influence online social identities have come to play in the daily life of college students. Yet, in spite of this, the world’s biggest brands still struggle to reach college students — the most coveted demographic — instead, throwing money at the problem through ineffective advertising methods.
At the end of 2010, Vinay Bhargava decided to leave Google — not a decision he made lightly after spending seven-plus years in Mountain View and Washington D.C. But the decision became clear after talking to a group of students at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia. The students helped him realize that, in spite of the fact that 
Back in September, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched a contest that aimed to challenge entrepreneurs and app developers to build awesome, innovative education apps on Facebook’s platform. The so-called 
One of the most important roles that technology can play in transforming education revolves around data. Whether that’s by implementing APIs to make student data more transportable (a la Clever and LearnSprout) or creating integrated, cloud-based analytics platforms that give educators more insight into student performance through realtime metrics, finding better ways to make data more accessible can solve some of the biggest problems that are crippling our educational system.
The world of ed-tech is ramping up another notch, and getting a lot more open in the process: educational publishing giant 
Experimenting can pay off, just ask 
Online video learning platform 