Shvoong Homework Brings Social Collaboration to The Classroom

Israeli based Shvoong Homework brings 'basecamp' style tools, to kids in school.

SH is a social network for students that aims to keep students organized, by adding an alternative to messy notebooks. Using Shvoong Homework, students can share homework online, keep their notes in project notebooks and create a calendar of reminders with no storage limit.

The Features
Shvoong Homework offers different privacy settings. The students can keep their notebooks completely private or share the information with a person, a group or the whole class. Another interesting feature is the timetable - it is linked to the notebook and can be customized to send alerts of upcoming events. The site currently supports 30 languages, such as English, Hebrew, Hindi, Portuguese, Polish, Arabic, and Farsi, so no matter where you go to school, you can probably use it.

To gain initial traction to the site, Shvoong Homework announced an essay competition for students in 9th to 12th grade. Students are asked to answer the question "If you were elected President of the United States, which issue would you work on first?". The winner takes a cool check for $500.

Competition

Shvoong is definitely not alone in the market. Google Docs and Spreadsheets platform promotes their education package, allowing users to share homework and papers as well. There's also San Francisco based Scribd, a well funded hot startup that recently launched a Facebook App designed for older students.

But isn't it just like copying?

Good question, and Jeffro2pto has received Shvoong's official response:

Sharing, and in essence copying, class notes and homework among teenagers has always existed in some form or another. That form in today’s technologically advanced and connected world is online. Many students already do homework on personal computers (for example using MS Word) and share it with friends simply by emailing or IM’ing each other. So while it can be argued that Shvoong Homework now makes it easier since the writing and emailing/sharing is in one program and automated, we believe that the positives are much greater than the negatives and that the results will show that.

Shvoong Homework is a subsidiary of Shvoong.com, an aggregator of abstracts, summaries and essays on varied topics in 34 languages. Founded in 2005, Shvoong is led by CEO Eyal Rivlin, formerly the COO of Cassava Enterprises - the company behind several major gambling sites. Based in Herzliya, Shvoong currently has a team of ten.

Want more?

Watch Shvoong's introduction video here.