“Web applications should be intuitive, easy to use and integrated to services that teachers, students and educational institutions already use, for that reason Google Apps was a key integration for us” says Jorge García, company CEO. “Now that Class.io is at the Google Apps Marketplace, educational institutions and Google Apps customers can get an intuitive and powerful communication tool for teachers and students that integrates seamlessly to their collaboration platform, specially Google Calendar and Google Docs.”

We have been working hard to have this integration ready for the launch of the new Education section of the Google Apps Marketplace. We are happy to be part of such an important milestone for Google on their effort to improve the quality of cloud computing applications for Education institutions all over the world.

If you have used Class.io in the past, you know that we have been integrated to Google Accounts, Google Docs and Google Calendar since day one. Now that we are on the Google Apps Marketplace our integration is much more robust and secure, allowing your Google Apps administrator to add class.io as an approved application for all the users on the domain.

If your school, university or educational institution is using Google Apps for Education, ask your domain administrator to add Class.io to your applications menu.

Once installed, all the users on your institution will have access to class.io directly from the Google Apps homepage.

So go ahead and check out class.io on the Google Apps Marketplace or if you are not a domain administrator you can always sign up on your own to give it a try.

We’ve been working hard lately on a new and improved version of class.io

Since our beta launch back in October, more than 1000 users have been testing class.io and sending their feedback, ideas and suggestions to help us improve the product. Today we are happy to announce  a whole new version of class.io, with many of the improvements that our users suggested, a new design and other features that are part of our product roadmap.

Some of the new things you’ll find on this update are:
.

• A beautiful new design and usability improvements.

• Improved homework turn in process for students.

• Students now can turn in homework documents directly from their Google Docs folders.

• We are now using Amazon S3 web services to store files, which makes the service more reliable, secure and allows for faster file transfer.

• A new and simple weekly calendar to help users view important dates and deadlines quickly and easily, all in one place.

• Now you can sign up for Class.io even if you don’t have a Google Account.

The idea got started because of my professional experience on the education field. I happen to be a computes systems engineer, a university professor, an academic manager at a University, the father of a school-age girl, an active member of a school’s PTA, a consultant implementing open source Learning Management Systems (LMS) and last but not least I am passionate about education overall. On all of these perspectives, some of my greatest frustrations were the same:

• How complex it is for a teacher to communicate effectively with students using the web
• The lack of effectiveness of most training efforts aimed to help teachers use the existing LMS (commercial or open source alike).
• How poorly integrated the existing LMS solutions are with platforms people use on a daily basis (i.e. Google Apps, Facebook and others)
• How little students use or pay attention to their current LMS platforms notifications methods

The new solution should be:

• So easy to use that little or none training is needed.
• So accessible that any teacher could signup and try it out for free.
• Integrated with the platforms that people use on a daily basis, such as Facebook for the students and Google Apps for the teachers and institutions.
• So easy to deploy that institutions and teachers can activate it quickly with just a few clicks.
• So engaging that teachers and students will want to use it instead of ‘being forced’ to.

I started thinking about it in 2009. During that time I had two last-year students (Luis Borjas and Fernando Escher) working with me as part of a scholarship program. I proposed the project to them and they agreed to join in as partners and work with me on the development. We worked on research and development between the last months of 2009 and the first months of 2010, finishing up a working prototype.

We made the mistake of adding more and more features to the first version instead of focusing on a Minimum Viable Product. The end result was a product that had too many things going on. However, there were some things that motivated us to continue, like when we applied to the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC and made it to the skype interview with Heather Harde. From the way the interview went I got the idea that she liked the concept, but at the same time it was clear that the product was not polished enough to make it to the finals.

Also in early 2010 we traveled to San Francisco for the Google I/O conference and I showed the idea to many people, most of whom had positive comments about it and motived us to push for an improved next version. By then I had already talked to Roberto Brevé from blipea.com to help us out with the user interface and usability, which we knew was really bad at the time, and I had also talked to Alejandro Corpeño from tuBabel.com, who always has good ideas on the business and marketing side. At Google I/O we talked even more with Roberto and Alejandro about working on a project together and the end result was that they would both join Class.io (at the time it was called Escolarea.com).

With Roberto and Alejandro bringing a lot of web development experience to the team and Luis, Fernando and I having the team dynamics and product vision already in place, we got together during the last days of June for a Hackathon. By early July we had launched a MVP that we tested with some friends who also happen to be teachers. The adoption rate was very low, the users were very confused by the user interface and the product lacked many administrative features that the teachers needed to manage their courses. We went back to designing and programming a new iteration and released a much better version in October which we are now testing with more teachers and students, a much better traction and getting tons of feedback to improve, specially from students since the teacher portion seems to be nailed down by now.

What is your target market and who can participate on class.io?

Class.io is aimed to teachers from k-12 and university level, also to independent private instructors or from training centers (for example the internal corporate training department of a company). Class.io is available for anyone who wants to us it, all you need is a Google Account, which gives them access to Google Apps (many universities and organizations worldwide are now adopting this system).

For us it is very important to have as many people as possible using class.io and it would be much better if they give us feedback, since our current focus is on creating an integral solution for teachers that want to manage their classes on the web.

As a startup we have user-centric development process and we try to adopt the Lean Startup methodology. Class.io is better suited for courses that take place in a physical classroom and use the web for communication purposes since our main objective is precisely that, to improve the communication and management of a course. We don’t want to be classified or enter the category of an LMS, CMS or any other existing technology, what really matters to us is to solve the key problems that teachers, students and institutions have regarding communications around courses.

We will adopt a freemium model, meaning that we will always have a free plan with certain limitations and we’ll offer paid-plans  for different use cases aimed at institutions and power users. We are sure that as the product evolves we will be adapting to our customers’ needs and will be shaping the business model accordingly.

We will start focusing in America and possibly some European countries. We expect to have our first paying clients in the first semester of 2011, once we have unveiled our premium version. We aspire for Class.io to be used by teachers all over the world, and we would like to be known as “the easiest, faster and most complete way to manage courses on the web, integrated to the platforms that students, teachers and institutions already use”.