MIND ON MY MONEY: How does ClassDojo, dubbed by Inc. as the “Slack for Classrooms,” plan to make money? According to the business magazine, the San Francisco startup behind a popular school communication and classroom management app plans to “leverag[e] its distribution capabilities to spread educational videos to an audience of teachers and students.”
ClassDojo has already toyed with this idea. Earlier this year it teamed up with Stanford researchers to create cartoon shorts introducing students to “growth mindset,” the idea that abilities and skills can be nurtured and developed over time. Roughly fifteen million students watched those videos, according to the company. This week ClassDojo announced it will produce a second series of cartoons on empathy, in collaboration with Making Caring Common, a Harvard University project. (Here’s the trailer.) These videos will be free, but “we want to, in the long term, enable parents to be consumers for their child’s education,” ClassDojo co-founder Liam Don, tells Inc.
Claiming users in more than two-thirds of U.S. schools, ClassDojo is “well-positioned as a platform for wide scale content delivery,” said Hermant Taneja, managing director at General Catalyst (an investor in the startup), in a prepared statement. “We’ve seen that transformation happen to consumer tech platforms like Snapchat. ClassDojo is following the same trajectory by connecting classrooms with content at significant scale.”
