Just in time for Teacher Appreciation Day, tech teacher-turned entrepreneur Adam Bellow unveiled the latest version of eduClipper.
EduClipper is a nicely designed web-based tool that teachers and students can use to collect materials--from digital text, video or other files on their computer, Google Drive, or even embedded code from other presentations or websites--and then share them in nifty Pinterest-like collections.
Teachers can set up independent "classes" of students, explicitly laying out the ground rules for what students can see and share. EduClipper uses EasyBib to add citations to files with one click. All the social features are in place, too.
Letting students share resources via eduClipper could also be a game-changer. Student could use eduClipper as a de facto portfolio, sharing their digital projects with each other, as well as with parents and teachers.
Bellow got started down this path almost six years ago--long before edtech was cool--as director of edtech for groups including the Hunter College Learning Lab. At the time, he collected and saved handy digital resource links on a site he called eduTecher. Bellow added most of the resources himself, effectively as a community service. (See this profile of Bellow in a recent EdSurge article).
Then tech caught up with him.
Last year Bellow morphed eduTecher into eduClipper, emphasizing a crowd-sourced way to collect and share resources. Teachers were thrilled, and signups quickly reached 25,000. Bellow also discovered that those teachers collectively clipped or contributed far more resources than he had. Investors, including LearnCapital, were impressed. Although Bellow declined to disclose how much he raised, he found enough funds to quit his day job and work intensely on eduClipper.
Looks like all the hard work was worth it. Richard Byrne, who blogs on Free Tech For Teachers and has advised Bellow, is a fan. "Well after a big investment from some venture capital firms and ten months of testing and revising features eduClipper is better than ever. In fact, I think it's what teachers wish Pinterest could be."
And Bellow's star status is still rising in educator circles. July will find Bellow giving one of the three keynote talks at ISTE in San Antonio.
