Familiar social media-like metaphor

dsby creates a social media-like space for every class in every school in a district. Then it adds the right students and teachers automatically from district systems, so staff doesn’t have to manage it. It’s a safe, structured place for a class to interact, share and learn digital citizenship, where even shy kids get a voice. Ideal for flipped classrooms and blended learning.

Course content

Teachers can copy and paste from rich web content and widely available Open Education Resources (OER) to build out curriculum, arrange courses in units, tag to standards and organize lesson plans, journals, homework, online testing and automated grading and more. Students see what they’ve completed and can participate in discussions. Everything is versioned, can be easily rearranged as necessary and re-used.

Teachers across a school or district can co-develop curriculum in Edsby and easily cut and paste it. Content from other systems can be imported through standards like IMS Common Cartridge, ePub (eBook, digital textbooks, etc.), SCORM and web sites, or accessed via LTI.

Edsby learning object repositories (LORs) enable curation of content so it can be easily searched and reused at district and/or school levels. A learning record store (LRS) provides student progress indicators as students consume course material, as well as history tracking of changes made to content. Older content can be viewed, updated or restored as required.

Polls, tests, files & parent access

Teachers can create polls and online tests, and organize files in a class library. They can also give parents realtime access to assignments and the course plan. Every class has a wiki-like knowledge base for collecting information.

Attendance

A comprehensive real-time online attendance system gives teachers a fast, simple way of entering attendance, eliminating student “runners” to the office. It provides sophisticated late slip handling, management of planned absences with parents, and works on mobile, too.

Attendance can be taken in Edsby and pushed to the district’s system of record, or pulled from the system and displayed in Edsby.

Seating plan

Each Edsby class shows where students are seated in the room. Ideal for beginning of term or substitute teachers.

How each class is doing

Teachers see graphical representations of achievement in their classes and can easily spot outlying students or gaps in instruction.