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SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., June 13, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Notebowl, the social learning platform that simplifies digital classroom management and collaboration based in Scottsdale, Arizona, today announced its partnership with the Foundation for California Community Colleges (Foundation), the official non-profit supporting the nation's largest system of higher education. Notebowl's social learning platform is available at aggregate pricing to all 114 community colleges and their 2.1 million students through the Foundation's purchasing program, CollegeBuys. Notebowl allows students to consume course information the way they do in real life in a safe and FERPA certified environment. "We look for solution oriented ways to develop agreements that can be leveraged systemwide so the colleges can focus on student completion," said Jorge J.C. Sales, executive director of program development of the Foundation for California Community Colleges. Notebowl will help participating community colleges to increase student engagement in the Canvas Learning Management System, a platform supported by the Online Education Initiative. Online peer-to-peer interaction increases the likelihood of students getting successful grades and organically enhances student engagement and retention. "We are delighted to partner with the Foundation for California Community Colleges in its effort to benefit, support, and enhance the community colleges. Notebowl's mission, at its heart, is to have students reach their full potential and this is yet another step toward accomplishing that," said Andrew Chaifetz, founder and CEO of Notebowl. Notebowl's seamless integration with Canvas creates a familiar and engaging environment to help students learn and succeed. The partnership will provide additional features for the California Community Colleges and their students and faculty. These additions include:
Classroom News Feed: Notebowl provides a social media like news feed where students and faculty can post, comment, like and even record audio or video. Social Discussion Boards with Metrics: Notebowl's social discussion boards provide the ability for faculty to set metrics, preview submissions, see analytics of discussions and grade with ease. Mobile Community: Notebowl helps students communicate on the go and get notifications on any collaboration happening in the class or in the community. To learn more, visit www.notebowl.com or www.foundationccc.org/CollegeBuys/For-Colleges/Our-Partners/Online-Education-Initiative
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Foundation for California Community Colleges Partners with Notebowl for Social Learning...

September 24, 2017
EDUCAUSE Preview: Notebowl Makes Learning As Easy As Facebook
What if you were a college professor or instructor and everything you needed to do to prepare for class, keep track of class materials, interact with students, distribute assignments, collect assignments and notify students of due dates was as easy as using Facebook? That’s what you get when you use Notebowl, a social learning platform, finally done right. Notebowl makes it simple to drive engagement in class and on campus, during class time and even on the weekends. In Notebowl you create learning communities around the classes you take. You can treat each individual class as a community or even make one community across all the classes that you teach. Once your students are in your community they can talk to each other, ask questions, get answers and have access to all of the information needed to succeed in your class. Instructors can share class notes, videos, pdfs, and other class material within the community. They can also distribute worksheets and instructions for assignments. Assignments can be distributed directly within Notebowl and instructors can grade them in Notebowl as well. As an assignment is turned in, an easy to use grading system lets the instructor grade the assignment and instantly give feedback on it. Students can privately ask questions about their work directly with the instructor as well. Notebowl has reinvented office hours giving instructors and students more flexibility (image: notebowl)
Instructors can easily record and broadcast their lectures within Notebowl leaving the lectures posted for students to watch when they have the time. When students watch lectures live there’s a Q&A function so they can ask questions during the lecture. When they’re not watching it live they can leave comments and ask questions as well, very similar to a Facebook Live video. Using Notebowl’s video tools and chat capability, instructors can host office hours anytime, from anywhere, even sitting at their kitchen table insuring students have the most opportunities to succeed. Students can make real connections beyond just the instructor. As students interact with one another in group discussions around class material they can set up study groups or other offline contact. They can find public communities within their college or university and join those as well. Whether they’re in the HAM radio club, student government or pledging an academic sorority, every active interest group on campus can have their own Notebowl community. Notebowl also makes it easy for students to keep up with their grades, assignments and due dates through their Automated Agenda feature. Important due dates and class dates are saved as reminders in students’ smart phones. Notebowl is also the most effective way to communicate with students taking your class, the entire campus and 1:1. Several studies have shown that college aged students have already, for the most part, abandoned email in exchange for more instant connections like messaging apps and notifications. Notebowl provides both. Better communication leads to better retention. Better retention leads to more completion. With the current graduation rate hovering around 59% it’s important for colleges and universities to use tools that students are familiar with and that will drive engagement, Notebowl is that tool. You can chat with the Notebowl team in the graduate area of the Startup Alley at EDUCAUSE in Philadelphia October 31- November 3 and find them online at http://notebowl.com

Notebowl Is The Social Learning Platform, Done Right!

EdSurge
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The night before Vivianne Nufio gives a presentation about “The Slaughter Yard,” a short story from Argentine poet Esteban Echeverría, she posts questions for her peers on her class website page. She asks what students think the author means in line 45, and how the story compares to others they’ve read. Nufio is giving them a heads up: the next day they’ll discuss these questions and more in class. Nufio, a senior and Spanish major at Denison University, is one of hundreds of students testing out a new way to manage courses and communication at the small liberal arts institution outside Columbus, Ohio. The university is  the first to adopt a tool called Notebowl to replace its legacy learning management system (LMS). “We’re a small liberal arts institution,” says Donnie Sendelbach, director of educational technology services at Denison, which has 2,200 students. “We usually end up with products a corporation designs and sells or something that a public research university developed but for public research environment.”
With the  Notebowl  implementation,  Denison is working closely with the company to tailor the platform to its needs, specifically managing all of the administrative work that goes into teaching, learning and campus life at the institution. Founded in 2011, Notebowl calls itself a next-generation learning management system. The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company provides a central platform where students can find and share information for all of their courses and extracurriculars. Andrew Chaifetz, founder and CEO of Notebowl, tells EdSurge the platform is like Facebook: Students see a news feed, pages for each of their classes, and channels for other activities including clubs and study groups. By contrast, “a legacy LMS is like a file system on a computer,” Chaifetz says. “It’s not easy to navigate or get a central view of everything there.”
Notebowl works like this: Students sign in and see a main page that features a general news feed with campus updates and curated posts from faculty and peers. They also have a calendar view with synced information for all of their courses and due dates for assignments. From their home site, students can click on pages for each of their classes and groups. These specific pages have a “bulletin” for news and updates, as well as sections for assignments, a gradebook and a roster so students can contact peers in their classes. Each course page features a news bulletin that looks similar to a Facebook or LinkedIn newsfeed. Image Credit: Notebowl
Veerendra P. Lele, department chair and associate professor in the department of anthropology and sociology at Denison, is piloting Notebowl in three classes: an advising section for first-year students and two social theory courses. Each section has between 10 and 20 students, and Lele says the platform works well for classes of this size. That’s in contrast to his experience with legacy LMSs. “I used maybe 10 percent of what you could do in Blackboard. And I felt like it was for bigger universities. The features seemed more suited for classrooms of 200 students.”
Most of the action in Notebowl so far has happened in the bulletin section, Lele says. He and his students post news, readings, videos and questions there and comment on them. “We have a history of the conversation,” he says. Over the weekend students were posting questions about their upcoming midterm. Lele says he could answer one student’s question there and avoid having to repeat his response through individual emails. Unlike many LMSs, which have built their own proprietary features, Notebowl includes integrations with other apps, especially ones from Google. Within the platform, professors can open a Google Hangout to hold office hours via video, for example. Notebowl also uses Google Analytics to track student behavior—how often they log into classes, which features they use—across the platform. Chaifetz says his company is working on other integrations, such as including Google Docs within the system so faculty can comment and track changes in student assignments and link the documents directly to grades. The Denison rollout is a work in progress. Sendelbach says her team has almost daily correspondence with Notebowl, and the company has made a few changes based on early feedback. For example, when students post questions anonymously, their peers can’t see their identity but faculty can. Denison faculty were worried that students wouldn’t realize this, so Notebowl added a notification to make the point clear. Faculty have also been requesting to add letter grades—rather than only points—to the gradebook. Lele says he’d like to be able to chat individually with students. For now if one student posts a question, he responds to the whole class and has to email students if he wants to have a private follow-up conversation. Nufio, the senior Spanish major, says she’s used to having more customized pages in Blackboard and wishes the course pages in Notebowl could have a little more personality. “Add a different background to it so it’s not It’s just that black and white template,” she says. This feedback is what Chaifetz and his team are looking for. Denison’s will continue the pilot phase through the spring semester and have Notebowl fully implemented for all courses in time for the 2017-2018 academic year. Comments

A Small Liberal Arts School Becomes a Testing Ground for the ‘Facebook of Learning Management Systems’

By FinSMEs
DeVry Education Group (NYSE:DV), a global provider of educational services, announced the second cohort of education technology startups to participate in its collaborative DV X Labs ed tech incubator located at 1871 , a Chicago-based entrepreneurial hub for technology startups. Each company’s team will spend time at 1871 connecting with the business community and refining their technological offerings. The new cohort includes:
– Chicago-based StudyCloud , an online engagement hub where students can interact with their professors and one another through discussion groups, chat, automatic alerts, assignment submission and grading. – Tucson, Arizona-based NoteBowl , a social learning platform that organizes content from courses and the campus community into one place. – Better Weekdays , a cloud-based career-management software platform company currently operating in St. Louis, Missouri, which helps universities improve job-placement outcomes for their graduates. As the new companies enter DV X Labs, the incubator’s first cohort, which included Youtopia, YuJa, CENTURY-Tech and Fletch, is now moving into the next phase of development and beta testing. FinSMEs

DeVry Education Announces Edtech Startups to Participate in DV X Labs

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Want to see all the Ka'Ching deals? NOTEBOWL: $600,000 to Scottsdale, AZ-based NoteBowl in a seed round from MagniPro Ventures. Founded in 2011, NoteBowl offers a social learning platform for college students, including private groups, messages, agendas and Hangouts on Air, which allows users to broadcast lectures, integrated with a Q&A feature, automatically saved to YouTube. NoteBowl’s pilot program is currently underway at the University of Arizona, which the three members of the executive team graduated from in 2013 and 2014.

$600K to NoteBowl for Collegiate Social Learning Platform

Denison University is an institution in the liberal arts and sciences, focusing on higher education. The university offers academic programs designed to support independent thinking and professional preparedness. Denison University primarily serves students seeking a liberal arts education. It is based in Granville, Ohio.

Denison University

`` We are excited , '' says Notebowl founder & CEO Andrew Chaifetz , `` to collaborate with Denison University to showcase the power of a social , student-centric learning experience .

Denison University Replaces Learning Management System with Notebowl, a Social Learning Platform

NoteBowl

Oracle

University of Arizona

Everspin

NoteBowl is a company that provides social learning platforms within the education sector. Their main offerings include a centralized feed for content sharing and community building, assignment features with originality scoring and grading, and analytics for monitoring student participation. These tools support various teaching modalities. It is based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Date	9/23/2015
Round	Unattributed
Amount	$0.72M
Investors	Undisclosed Investors
Valuation	$XXM
Revenue	0 FY undefined
Sources	2

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NoteBowl

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