During the One Spark Festival, we had a chance to speak with a great many education-based creators, owing in part to the creation of the #EdSpark venue. There were some really awesome proposals, including Flip Our Class. However, while there were a lot of education-based projects, there were only a couple really creative software/platform products. Of these, CLASSWrites was, without a doubt, our favorite.
During the crowdfunding festival, we had a chance to speak with Diane Bixler, the founder of CLASSWrites. Bixler told us that the main motivation behind the creation of the product was the huge amount of fragmentation in the education software/platform space. Some teachers use Turnitin to grade papers, others use Backborad, and others use email and Google Docs. While this is not really a problem for the teachers, it can be a pain for students who have to submit assignments to 3 different platforms. This is exactly why Bixler is in the process of building CLASSWrites.
Essentially, CLASSWrites is a workflow management system. However, CLASSWrites has many more features that make it a truly unique platform:
CLASSwrites.com is a web-based platform providing a workflow management system designed specifically for educators. This platform will facilitate collaborative writing and allow classes to publish their unique collaborative stories through the site as a fund raising opportunity. 1
The platform is unique in that it incorporates a fundraising aspect. Bixler went into a lot of detail about this aspect in the video below, so rather than butcher it, I will let her discuss fundraising.
What’s more, the platform is 100% COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) compliant, so there is no need to worry about students’ privacy:
The software application accommodates any degree of collaboration of students and allows for tracking by teachers or administrators. Being COPPA compliant, parents will also have access to see due dates and project specifications as well as monitor their own child’s work. No other platform offers the thorough functionality of CLASSwrites. 2
CLASSWrites was without a doubt one of the more interesting #EdSpark projects that we were able to see. We were able to talk with Bixler a bit about her project, the fundraising aspect of CLASSWrites, and the future of the platform:
