Nic Borg: Co-Founder, edmodo

For those who don’t know, how did the founders come up with this idea for edmodo? In other words, why edmodo?
We saw teachers trying to leverage social networks and social media to improve learning in their classrooms but struggling because those sites are blocked and not designed for classroom communications.
You are in 10,000 schools already, do those schools communicate with each other on this platform? How exactly does it work?
Schools and Districts sign up for their own customized Edmodo subdomain which instantly connects teachers, schools and the entire district securely and across multiple devices (laptop, cell phone, smart phone, etc).  We have some more information on our blog.
Your company has done a great job of providing the social tools of the web that students are accustomed to normally, and putting it in a safe and easy to understand format that actually accelerates and promotes learning. What else can we expect as edmodo grows?
We are diligently working to to find more and more ways to spur on collaboration, and help teachers/students find and share content of the highest quality and relevance. One example is the soon to be launched Communities. Communities will allow teachers to come together around shared interests starting with the core subject areas, and instantly share that content with their classrooms.
There’s been some talk in education reform circles about the importance of peer-to-peer learning. How does edmodo handle this activity, and how do you facilitate student learning in a social web environment without losing control of the ship, so to speak — kids talking and chatting with each other, getting distracted?
We’ve really focused on mastering classroom communication, by listening to feedback from our teachers. Students only message the entire group or the teacher directly, which parallels the dynamic of the classroom. We’ve also found that students today are good digital citizens and teachers hold students to the same standards online as they do in person.