Edmodo, “the Facebook for schools,” appointed a new chief executive. Computer scientist Vibhu Mittal has been chief technology officer and head of engineering at Edmodo since March 2013. (Edmodo bought his start-up company, Root-One, an educational platform for K-12 applications). Prior to that, Dr. Mittal (he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at USC) was senior scientist at Google, and co-founder of the Google India Engineering Center.
Edmodo is a website for teachers, students and parents that can be used for online classroom discussions and projects that can be monitored by parents. Teachers are really the ones in control. While it is a social networking platform, students can’t send private messages to each other – they can post only to the group or the teacher. The big flag raised by some parents is privacy. Edmodo is a private company holding a lot of personal information about them and their children. Edmodo, which says it has 45 million users in 200 countries, has raised $87.5 million in venture capital.