Introducing new features to Skype in the classroom

As some of you know, we’ve been working with Skype on Skype in the classroom, a community for teachers and educators, for a few months now. In the time since it was launched formally in April, it has grown by leaps and bounds: we now have more than 16,500 teachers who are collaborating on more than 900 projects across the globe.

Yesterday, we released the most recent set of new features to the service, which we are very excited about.

 

Creating projects

Teachers can now confirm an end date for their projects, and choose to receive email notifications to help keep themselves on track.

 

They can also affiliate themselves with the school they teach at, on their profile page. And the new ‘project inspiration’ page features a few teachers talking about things that helped make their projects a success.

Promoting projects

We’ve made it easier for teachers to share and promote their projects. They can get a Skype in the classroom badge and a project widget to help spread the word about their project and affiliation with Skype in the classroom on their blogs and on the wider web (look at the sharing tools on this specific Skype project here, for example). There’s an ‘I’d like to do this’ button on projects that they can click if they’d like to participate in projects. And they can stay up to date with when new projects are added to the site by adding the Projects RSS/Atom feed to their feed reader.

Leaving feedback on projects

To help inspire others, we believe that this new feature, enabling project owners to leave feedback on projects, is really useful. Participants can click on the ‘I’ve done this’ button on the project page to leave feedback and content (photos/videos) about their project experience.

Skype has written a nice blog post as well explaining these new features; take a look at it if you’d like to know a bit more.

Skype's CEO Tony Bates is going to be talking about Skype in the classroom at the Mashable Social Good summit later today: follow the discussion @socialgood or by watching the #socialgood hashtag on Twitter 

We’re really gratified to see how the educational community has embraced Skype in the classroom, and we look forward to seeing how they continue to use the service!

Here's an infographic by the nice people over at I Can Do That in the US, who have visualized some Skype stats: