I'll bite: introduction to ChitChat

Hi CR2.0 folks~ I run ChitChat, a (small and very young) "educational network" designed to help educators make better use of the net in their classes. I occasionally troll around CR2.0 to see whose forum questions our stuff can answer, but kudos to Skip for providing a place where we can engage in a more direct discussion about what we're trying to do with our service.

ChitChat is a few things... the overlong first sentence of the company's official executive summary says we provide a network of high-quality academic content and unique classroom tools that improve learning results by allowing educators to easily build rich, interactive course content; share that content around a global network of academic users; successfully integrate that content into the classroom with interactive websites that allow students to actually do work on the web; and extract unprecedented value from student data with simple-yet-powerful analytic tools. Accurate, if complicated.

The story I always tell people to get the point across is this: I was chatting with an 8th grade math teacher in Maine (where, as you may know, the state provides laptops to all 7th & 8th graders), and asked her how she and her students use the laptops, given the criticism in the state of these "expensive typewriters." She said they sometimes go online and play educational math games--a great way to get students drilling on things they'd be bored to tears by on paper! "Awesome," I said, "so how do you take the results of the games, write them in a gradebook, provide feedback, etc.?" And without hesitation, she said "We can't, that's why we don't do it very often."

That's the problem I'm going after, because I think it's a problem that most solutions offer either content without process--such as those educational games--or process without content, like your average LMS. To clarify the latter, I used Blackboard in college, and it was a slightly more prolific way for a professor to hand out a syllabus, and nothing more. Educators should be free to have their students blog, engage in online discussions, go fix articles on wikipedia, play educational games, and more, but the problem is that it's hard to collect, assess, and provide feedback on these things. That's what ChitChat does: it lets you create interactive content that automatically collects students' work and presents it to you logically. We've got flashcards not unlike Quizlet or something, except that we show you averages, performance graphs, incorrect guesses, and more from each of your students so you can diagnose problem areas and offer support where it's necessary, giving the autonomy I think everyone on CR2.0 values everywhere else. Beyond just the flashcards, we've got superior ways for you to collect actual assignments without documents or e-mails, great rich-text authoring tools, and a small-but-growing network of content developed by adventurous educators who've tried ChitChat in the 50 or so days since we officially launched.

I could go on, but I'd love it if you just checked it out. But since this is a discussion, let's have more than just me talking at you. Anyone have anything to say? Questions for me? Stories to tell? Feature requests? Other tools that address similar needs?