Imbee for teachers launched

By Vivek Puri | September 19th, 2006 at 11:49 pm ET         

Imbee, part of Industrious Kid Inc, has launched a new social networking platform for Teachers and Schools. The new feature enables teachers to interact with students using blogs and other related tools. Imbee.com started off as a secure social networking and blogging destination specifically designed for kids from ages 8 to 14.

Teachers can signup on Imbee.com and add student accounts. Parents can choose to sign up their child on Imbee or allow the teacher to complete registration on their behalf. From there on Teachers/Students can create class blogs. Blog posts can contain class assignments, daily insights and pictures. Teachers can create photo albums to share with the entire class. Imbee also has messaging feature that can be used to remind students of school events, tests and homework or send class announcements.

Imbee’s idea is nice but I am not totally convinced with their setup. First issue why they need credit card number for verification when a teacher wants to register at Imbee. What point does it prove? Couldn’t they have used Paypal for verification instead? Also while registering they just ask for School Name. If Imbee is trying to focus on teachers and schools they should be at least be collecting the address for the school so that they can build a school database for later use. Adding new students into Imbee is not an easy task, which can be done only one at a time. Since teacher is not associated with a school, there is no way that you can pull up all students for a particular school and add the ones from your class. Even otherwise the site is lacking in too many features. Like, no support for RSS feeds. Imbee claims that using their system, parents can passively watch over their kid’s activities. I think it will be better to have RSS feeds for each activity type a student can participate in, which can be than subscribed to by parents. There is no support for customization of user pages, hence you can’ upload you school logo. Photo upload and album creation is so web1.0′ish.

On the whole I don’t see the motivation for teachers and students to join Imbee given the current options and feature set. Imbee team needs to clarify its agenda and provide a clear direction to its young users.

Links:
Imbee
Imbee for Teachers and Schools

Tags: StartupSquad, LMS