From Susan Kim, CEO of Edmodo

Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched as teachers, parents, students, and school leaders grapple with an incredibly difficult challenge. As a mother of two girls whose school has closed and moved to remote learning, I know how important it is for my daughters to still feel connected to their friends, classmates, and teachers. Learning is one thing, but feeling part of something bigger—a learning community—is even more critical at this time. As more and more communities distance themselves socially, it’s vital that our children and students around the world remain connected.

Today, more and more announcements are coming out of school districts indicating an extension of coronavirus school closures through May—others will likely follow suit in the coming days. We must be prepared for remote learning and online connectedness to be part of our children’s “new normal” experience. We need to make a shift from short-term band-aid responses to longer term solutions, and taking care of our kids’ social needs must be a top priority. 

This crisis has galvanized our efforts at Edmodo to work even harder to ensure that schools and communities remain connected even when we are physically apart. We are experiencing a tremendous increase in the number of teachers, students, and parents logging in to Edmodo as communities around the world look for a distance learning platform, and we continue to prepare and scale for this global demand.

Just last week the Egyptian Ministry of Education announced that Edmodo would be the designated online learning platform for the K12 education system in Egypt. As a part of this rollout, Edmodo will also integrate with the innovative Egypt Knowledge Bank, one of the world’s largest educational digital libraries, to bring in a massive volume of interactive content to the more than 19M students and teachers in Egypt.

As this global situation continues to unfold, we’re examining our platform and making relevant adjustments to help meet the demands of this continually changing environment and the demands of distance learning and remote teaching. We’ve also set up a webpage with distance learning resources for everyone affected by school closures, and we are continually updating this Distance Learning Toolkit to help our community.

This crisis has strained and stretched us all in many ways, but we remain strong. I’m proud of how educators have been using Edmodo to build community and stay connected, both within their classrooms and with others around the world. Even if we can’t gather in person, you’ve shown that gathering digitally makes us all #bettertogether. Please share your thoughts, concerns, and wishes during this time with me on Edmodo using that hashtag—we’re in this together.