TIGed Virtual Classroom Renewal

Over the last four months, our team at TakingITGlobal has been hard at work redesigning the entire TIGed virtual classroom platform. This was no small feat - thousands of educators and students use TIGed each day in global collaborative projects, and since its launch in 2006 nearly 5,000 schools have signed up to use the free platform to support engaging online learning.

Overall, one major goal of the revamp was to upgrade the design using a responsive web framework - that means that the entire site will look just as good (and be just as functional) on a small 4-5" screen as on a large desktop monitor. This is a major benefit for any teachers or students using TIGed on their mobile devices!

Other improvements have also been made, based on requests from users and partners:

• A better editor: A new text editor has been implemented across the platform, allowing for cleaner text formatting, drag-and-drop image uploading, and easy video embedding (just paste a link and hit enter!)
• Easier place adding: Maps now uses the Google Maps places database, which means adding items to a map (and looking up geographical coordinates) is as easy as searching from a dropdown box!
• Classroom profiles: Student and educator profiles are now classroom-specific, and feature a Recent Activity feed making it easy to identify and access the person's latest contributions in the classroom. Profiles are also now editable within TIGed, removing the need to leave the TIGed interface to complete your profile.
• Simplified tools: Based on frequent feedback, we merged videos into the "Gallery" feature, which now supports both image uploads and video adding from YouTube and Vimeo. We also merged Bookmarks and Files into "Resources", and increased file uploads from 2 MB to 5 MB.
• Multi-threaded Discussions: Discussion threads can now have three levels of replies. That's right - you can reply to a reply to a reply to the thread.
• Classroom Messenger: If enabled by the teacher, classroom participants now have access to private messages within the classroom space, with Group messaging support.

Want to give the new platform a whirl? You can explore the Demo Classroom. We look forward to hearing your feedback about these improvements and ideas for future additions to the TIGed platform!