Monday, January 17, 2011

Knowledge Athletes begins to promote Kajour

OS-Cubed has been the principal developer for the product kajour by Knowledge AthletesKajour is a real-time collaborative education platform, extensible and designed entirely with Microsoft products, including IIS, ASP.NET, VB.NET, C#, fCK, DotNetNuke, Microsoft SQL Server, and other technologies.  Based on a unique and custom REST engine, designed entirely in .NET using modern AJAX, JQuery and XML/XSLT, the system is completely real time, including logged chat, auto save functionality, full embeddable editing, real time scoring and grading, and full student accountability.

Knowledge Athletes is the brainchild of Dave Miller, a successful educator and entrepreneur.

The beta for the product was developed over the course of the last couple of years using our entrepreneurial development techniques, including agile, scrum and a fully collaborative process.  Funding for the project was provided through private investment and several SBIR grants which assisted in the base research for product features and capabilities, and provided proof of educational effectiveness.
From a "non-technical" point of view the system allows teachers to create homework assignment for kids to work on in an environment that is "Facebook-like" either individually or in teacher-defined collaborative groups.  Kids love this, and seem to prefer to do homework in kajour over other platforms.  Since all content is logged, and private only to the class, students are able to be held accountable for their input.  This allows teachers to guide students in the use of social media in a controlled environment, as well as opening new avenues for collaborative learning.  Kids call it "Facebook for homework" and teachers call it a revelation - a view into how kids think about and process their homework assignments like no other tool that they have found so far.

The product is still in beta release, with a limited set of participants.  If you are an educator interested in actively participating in the Kajour Trial, check out their website at: http://demo.kajour.com/, or click the button below.

Here is a video, developed by Mac Village Productions and Skeeter Harris, after the fold :)



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