How one school district has big plans for Edsby over time

Farmington Municipal Schools has its eye on the future. And with Edsby, it’s investing in plumbing for that future.

The public school district of 10,000 students and 1,200 staff in the northwest corner of New Mexico was looking to lay the infrastructure for standards-based grading and common core curriculum. It was also seeking a way to share assignments.

At the same time, it wanted to continue to benefit from the culture of collaboration and sharing that students, teachers and other staff in the district have enjoyed for the previous 19 years with the popular education email and groupware product FirstClass.

In the 2012 school year, Farmington adopted social networking software Edsby to help it facilitate some of this.

Farmington had confidence in Edsby because it was designed and published by the same core team that built FirstClass. “Everything you did there [with FirstClass] was nice and solid,” noted Charles Thacker, Director of Technology, Farmington Municipal Schools. “Having this group start something with a different name, I didn’t see how it could possibly be bad.”

Thacker said the motivation to find another solution for group collaboration than FirstClass was his biggest motivation.

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