China's Education Instant Messaging Facts

• Published in: Marketwire p. 1
• Format: Trade Publication Article
• Language: English
• Published: Toronto Intrado Digital Media Canada Inc 12.04.2007

First, CEREM stands for China Education Resources Education Messenger. We call it EM (Education Messenger). EM is China's first vertical instant messaging utility. It was specifically developed for and is targeted at China's vast K-12 education sector which is comprised of 12,000,000 teachers and 230,000,000 students! It was launched at the beginning of the month in beta form with the 16,000 teachers currently enrolled in our training program. These teachers are using EM on their computers and the reaction has been exceptionally good. EM is much more than instant messaging. It is also an education tool which allows teachers and students to access education resources e.g. lessons, homework, reference materials, customized lesson plans etc. A unique feature of EM is that it will direct selected information into the user's personal ePortfolio which is a life long record of educational activity allowing teachers to monitor the progress of individual students as they go through the education system. As you may know, CER is committed to becoming the world's largest provider of ePortfolios and EM will play a big role in adding richness to the content of ePortfolios for both students and teachers. Basically, EM will improve education by greatly facilitating the dissemination of educational resources to teachers and students. And that is just the first iteration of EM. Future versions will be designed for use by education administrators, government officials, and parents of students. I have attached a summary of EM which more fully describes its functions. While it is very important as an educational tool, EM also allows any user to communicate with any other user, thereby creating a social network of like-minded people. In fact, we are developing EM to read a user's personal profile and automatically build networks for them that are populated by subject matter experts in their teaching fields as well as teachers who work in the same subject areas.