Business Idea: School Organizer
Written by Patrick at Develop Daly.
I have been searching for a while now for a one stop site that allows collaboration between students to share notes. I still haven’t found anything worth getting a class excited about. Here are some of the tools I’ve found and rated on a scale of 1-10.
- mySchoolLog - 5
- Design: 5 - very bright and big; seems like it would be great design for middle schoolers
- Collaboration: 0 - although they plan on implementing collaboration they currently lack it
- Notes: 5 - although the editor is fairly well decked out with with formatting tools and such they currently lack any way of tracking revisions - a feature that might come with collaboration
- Speed: 4 - the Ajax is a little unstable and gets stuck sometimes
- User Interface: 7 - The interface is pretty intuitive, though the design is distracting
- NoteMesh - 6
- Design: 6 - simple, but fairly dull
- Collaboration: 8 - entire class can be involved with editing notes and interacting on a message boar
- Notes: 5 - the wiki has the basics of a text editor but doesn’t go to far in depth; offers history and revision tracking
- Speed: 9 - well built site
- User Interface: 4 - confusing navigation, especially for new users and classmates not so prone to Internet usage
These are two of the only mediocre sites I have found - all other sites are less than mediocre. If you have any worth using, let me know.
Someone should really take this idea and develop it though. I would love an application that would really aid students.
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developdaly wrote Business Idea: School Organizer on June 1st, 2007 and there are 16 comments. There will be one more after you add yours, though. Read more posts by developdaly.
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16 Responses to “Business Idea: School Organizer”
June 1st, 2007
9:44 am
mySchoolog is VERY bright, but I like its interface better.
Hey Noah can’t wait for Mint to be released…my wallet is craving it.
June 1st, 2007
10:14 am
This is something to keep in mind. It’s not public or maybe not even started, but cool idea:
http://www.centernetworks.com/and-the-winner-is-the-note-sharing-tool
And Noah, Noah didn’t write this post (this sounds so weird).
June 1st, 2007
11:38 am
it’s not myschooLLog; it’s mySchoolog (with one ‘L’)
June 1st, 2007
12:04 pm
Noah since you have such a great name please email me and I will try to hook you up.
How can I do a better job of showing I didn’t write the post?
June 1st, 2007
12:07 pm
Add tag “Written by” up top
June 1st, 2007
12:12 pm
Whoos.. it deleted my tag. What I mean to say is:
Add a [blink] tag to “Written by� up top
June 1st, 2007
1:05 pm
Check out ChitChat (http://www.chitch.at). They haven’t launched yet but are in the same space.
June 1st, 2007
1:56 pm
a lot of schools use something called blackboard, which seems like collaborative software, but i haven’t investigated
June 1st, 2007
2:13 pm
Blackboard doesn’t have much collaboration, and if it did I don’t think anybody would use it, because this software is written for the 1998 world. Blackboard and PeopleSoft needs a web2.0 solution, but it’s not going to come from the actual companies, somebody outside will have to do it. But since there’s not a lot of money in nonprofit/education software, it’ll be a while before we’ll see something that’s enterprise level and web2.0ish.
June 1st, 2007
2:55 pm
Agreed Blackboard and PeopleSoft are POS software for the end-user.
They might be great for teachers (blackboard) and school management (pplsoft) as far as features, but damn, such horrible applications.
As Andre mentioned, both could be so much better. It’s not so much that the isn’t money in educational software (which may be true, I dont know.. Id imagine schools to shell out good money for the licenses), but there’s not competition big enough to shake the two companies. So why improve? They get all the business anyways.
Even if you make a killed product, you still have to convince schools to switch.
Something to think about though.
June 1st, 2007
2:57 pm
Yeah I know Noah didn’t write this post, but I know that he would probably read the comments anyway…I’m sly like that.
June 2nd, 2007
1:20 am
I used to use http://stu.dicio.us/
Seems to be down right now. I have settled for a desktop app called Schoolhouse.
Hoping that a facebook dev will make an app for student note sharing. It could plug right into the “Courses” section of user’s profiles, which intelligently learns each school’s course catalog.
June 4th, 2007
12:27 am
I am still looking…
June 4th, 2007
5:11 am
Hey guys–Saw my company mentioned above, so I thought I’d chime in briefly. I agree wholeheartedly with Andre and Dimitry’s comments; I went through college with Blackboard, which is full half the reason I started ChitChat. Not to be too salesy, but with Blackboard, teachers upload documents and students download them and print them out, and then vice-versa. Students get the same syllabus they’d get if the teacher handed it to them in person. In that way, Blackboard and its ilk create extra work for their users by adding extra awkward processes on top of all the stuff students and teachers do already.
If you’re interested, you can check out an introductory video we’ve just posted on the product page of our website that says a bit about how fundamentally different and completely collaborative ChitChat is in comparison. I’m happy as anything to see the commenting going on here; we all want a slick application that doesn’t make extra work.
June 6th, 2007
8:11 pm
I thought about making the kind of site you describe (a wiki for classes, books, tests, etc.)
But people kept coming back with “what is the motivation?”
If you type notes already, you do it for yourself not others, right?. If you don’t type notes would you start doing it just to share? If you’re the note giver do you feel cheated, if you’re the note taker do you feel bad when someone else spent the time organizing the knowledge for your use?
And so on…
I don’t think anything like this will ever become mainstream, unfortunately.
October 27th, 2007
8:00 pm
So, just stumbled upon your site by some Google Search and some of your posts have somehow intrigued me (not an easy task). I decided to comment on this particular one because it’s been haunting my sleep for weeks now. I just found it a coincidence that you posted this. Spying on my mind, eh?
Actually, I was thinking of gearing it more towards the K-12 population, and more teacher-student-parent communication, but emphasizing the student collaboration.
There are quite a few pieces of work that don’t have the student collaboration aspect, but fail at communication as well: hence my idea. Goal: don’t suck.
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