Chattanooga-based Skoodat on Thursday released Skoodat Village, its cloud-based student management software, to the public.
The software is designed to appeal to smaller schools that need to link students, teachers and parents together using universal metrics that can be accessed through the private, secure social network.
“With cloud computing, I see no reason why smaller education organizations should be denied the kinds of capabilities formerly available only to the big districts and universities,” said Ken McElrath, educator and Skoodat CEO.
The company said that of the more than 76,000 schools with less than 30 teachers, very few can afford to install and maintain “old-school” technologies, which require server rooms, technicians and extra space.
In addition, many stand-alone server builds are closed silos, McElrath said, meaning that different schools using different measuring sticks and different technologies can evaluate the same student very differently.