Grouply for Education: A feature-rich, ad-free community platform for schools, classrooms, and PTAs
Grouply has long been a favorite tool in the education community. Teachers, parents, and students use Grouply social groups to collaborate and share information with each other. Today we are pleased to announce Grouply for Education, a bundle of premium services offered for free to qualifying education groups such as schools, classrooms, and parent-teacher associations. We designed Grouply for Education specifically to meet the needs of teachers and educators. Grouply provides a rich feature set with dozens of applications to help parents, teachers, and students communicate and collaborate online, yet it is remarkably simple to configure and use.
Classrooms around the world have begun to adopt online technology to enable collaboration and communication between teachers, students, and parents. With education budgets under pressure, teachers are seeking free solutions that they can configure and maintain themselves without support from technology departments. These online solutions must be ad-free to ensure an appropriate, commercial-free learning environment.
Ning recently announced that Ning Mini would be free for K-12 classrooms. However, Ning Mini offers very few features and customization options and may therefore be inadequate for many classroom uses. For instance, Ning Mini does not support custom pages, events, subgroups, or Facebook integration
Grouply for Education, by contrast, delivers a free, comprehensive package for education groups. It includes no advertising; unlimited custom pages; support for events, subgroups and Facebook integration; and access to Grouply Analytics and all premium Grouply applications.
As we previously announced, Grouply offers an easy-to-use migration tool that lets you quickly move your Ning Network members and content to a social group on Grouply.
For more information and to request Grouply for Education for your group, please visit the Grouply for Education information page.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at 2:20 pm and is filed under New Releases.
August 1st, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Hi,
Does Grouply for Education offer a free service for all education institutions, including schools in Australia?
Cheers,
Heath
August 18th, 2010 at 7:38 pm
Ning Alternatives « Education 2.0 says:[...] are many great features about grouply that I find perfect for the educational crowd (click the link to read their own blog [...]
September 8th, 2010 at 11:36 pm
The greatest limitation of the Ning Mini free sponsorship by Pearson Education is the 150 member ceiling. When a community has happily functioned from a Ning for several years, the community is there and to disrupt that flies in the face of community and network-based education. That’s what Ning did. If a community is successful it will grow beyond 150 members. In that case sponsorship does not apply and the cost to perpetuate a successful Ning is $200 a year. The choice is to either pay that, year after year, or migrate. Grouply offered a fairly seamless migration plan, and integration with YahooGroups is a big plus, because again, it preserves community. The cost to upgrade beyond the basic plan is reasonable, $5 a month, but any time educators are relieved of having to budget and arrange payment, often impossible through an institution, then community and network can flourish spontaneously. I hope it is Grouply’s intent to nurture that kind of atmosphere for growth of learning, which is something that Ning under its new management clearly did not understand.
September 25th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
I have just started using Grouply and am excited to see how useful it is for networking, engaging with students and marketing my business.
Having fun with it so far ~:-)