Edmodo

» see edmodo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

edmodo was a 2008 startup from two it administrators at chicago-area schools, nic borg and jeff o'hara, who wanted facebook for the classroom without all the parts of facebook that scared school districts. teachers created a class with a join code. students then posted to a private feed where the teacher could attach assignments and quizzes. parents could be invited as a separate role with read-only visibility. the brand color was a slate-blue and the logo was a school house. for the first five years it grew by word of mouth between teachers.

by july 2019 the company claimed over 100 million users across teachers, students and the parents linked to them. in april 2018 netdragon, a chinese gaming and education conglomerate, bought edmodo for 137.5 million dollars. the deal was small for a 100-million-user property, which is what you would expect when the property is a network of free accounts with no clear path to revenue. netdragon planned to fold it into its global edtech division and that did not really happen.

covid hit in 2020 and remote learning briefly made every school-facing tool relevant again. edmodo had a brief usage spike but lost the platform war to google classroom, which was free and already wired into every gmail-using district. on june 16, 2022, edmodo announced it would shut down on september 22, 2022. it did. a year later the ftc sued the company for violating the children's online privacy protection act by harvesting student data for ad targeting, and a federal court entered a permanent injunction requiring deletion of records for users under 13.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

visually it was an early facebook clone with a teacher in the admin seat. teachers could post a homework assignment with a due date and an attached pdf. students replied in a thread. quizzes had multiple choice and short answer. polls existed. you could send a private message to one student. parents got a digest. there was a small library of shareable resources between teachers. nothing in the feature set was extraordinary. the value was that it was free, locked behind a class code rather than open like facebook.

~ the postmortem ~

google classroom shipped in 2014 and took the school market by riding on the gmail accounts schools already had. microsoft teams for education arrived in 2017 and took the rest. by 2021 edmodo's usage was a small fraction of its 2014 peak. netdragon stopped investing and announced the shutdown with three months of notice. the closing message asked teachers to download their data and migrate to one of the survivors.

the ftc case was the postscript. edmodo had been serving ads to students under 13 using data collected without parental consent. the june 2023 consent order banned the practice and ordered deletion of all data on under-13 users. by then the service no longer existed, so the order applied to records sitting in a database nobody was logging into.

~ honest distance ~

i was 24 when edmodo launched and 38 when it died, well past school age in both directions and not a parent. the only personal contact i had with this product was reading about the shutdown in tech press. the orbit was american k-12 teachers in particular, and a smaller european and latin american adoption layer. turkey had eba and bilim olimpiyatlari and a few other state-run school platforms. edmodo was not a brand i ever saw on a school portal here.

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