After we welcomed our 25 millionth Kami user, we took time to reflect on the astonishing growth we experienced in the last year. We recalled the many product improvements introduced to support the rapidly evolving needs of educators. It was certainly a massive year for Kami, as we expanded our team, invested in our community, and smashed through several key milestones.
This blog will cover important stats from our community, exciting news on resources, and our most recent product updates.
We couldn’t have made any of these improvements without you, our community, so thank you all for being a part of our journey to reimagine the classroom.
Product Updates
Over the last year, we have updated our product considerably. There have been so many new changes, it’s easier to list them! You can also read more in our product update blog.
New releases and enhancements
- Improvements to OneDrive, SSO and file sharing with our Microsoft integration
- Add Media tool
- Delete All Annotations
- Formative Assessment Field
- Annotation Bank is available in beta
- Improvements to Kami’s Google Drive permissions
- More colours added to the Kami palette — 250 to be exact!
- Longer recording time for Voice and Video Comments
- Manually delete user’s own Kami account via Kami setting
Google Classroom integration
- Feature restrictions
- Improved tablet and mobile phone compatibility
- Improved “Grade in Kami” performance
- Assessments mode coming soon
- Smart detection and Turn-In button availability for student assignment file copies from a view only assignment.
- Open with Kami link option to support mobile and tablet devices
Canvas integration
- Real-time monitoring and intervention on Kami assignments
- Primary teacher detection and improved automatic sharing between the teacher and students
- Improvements to push notifications for student accounts
- Improved Speedgrader performance
- Assessments mode coming soon
- Feature restriction
Schoology integration
- Assessments mode coming soon
- Improvements to the grading feature are in the works
- Better scaffolding of annotations is in the works
We have also been making improvements to the license dashboard to enable users to gather usage and engagement insights and improve error reporting. Head over to your license dashboard to see the changes.
Other new features include the Google Classroom feature restrictions to help make the toolbar feel less overwhelming, improvements to the loading times and collaboration options across all of our Learning Management System integrations, such as allowing real-time feedback through the Canvas Speed Grader and the new Annotation Bank.
The milestones we hit together
As we reached 25 million users recently, we reflected on the impact of our community and pulled some exciting facts.
Since its inception, our community has saved over 36 billion pages from being printed. If we were to stack that paper, it would create a stack 4,000 miles high! That’s 16 times the height of the International Space Station… in other words, that’s A LOT of paper.
As a result of that paper saving, 4.2 million trees and $4.5 billion in printing costs have been saved.
Resources, support, and training updates
Our community is what makes Kami unique, so across the business, we have looked at how we can provide even more support for our community.
Growing the team
We have significantly grown our Customer Success team as well as our Social Media team to ensure someone is always on hand to answer your questions no matter when or where they come from.
Events and live webinars
We are increasing our contribution to providing industry-leading professional development for teachers with our hero event, Kami Connect. Kami Connect will now be held twice a year to further support educators all over the world.
We have also introduced weekly live Q&A webinars hosted by our Customer Success team. These live Q&As will tackle everything you would like to know from setting up Kami licenses to getting the most out of Kami tools and features.
The team is working to provide more webinars in the coming months. Webinars featuring Kami integrations with Google Classroom, Schoology, Canvas and many more will be announced soon. Head to our events page here to book your spot!
Kami Certified Educators Program
Our free certification program provides online training for educators who want to grow their Kami proficiency. Last month, we launched a level 2 certification with an advanced course for all Kami Certified Educators ready to take their training to the next level.
Continually updating our resources
We are continuing to build a library full of rich content, resources, and guides for teachers – this has become a priority for our team in 2021.
Our YouTube channel is an excellent place for resources with over 280 videos designed to support and help you.
Going International
This year, Kami is working on making our product resources more accessible to educators based in other parts of the world or who prefer to teach and consume content in other languages. Our support articles, handbook, and tutorial videos will be localised and released in over 10 languages to ensure that non-English speakers can benefit from everything Kami has to offer.
Partnerships
We are continuing to build our relationship with the right partners to ensure that our users get the best experience out of Kami. This year, joining Google Cloud, PowerSchool, and Instructure, are Microsoft and iCivics. Working with these partners means that you are able to use Kami with the tools you are already familiar with such as Google Classroom, Schoology, Canvas, and OneDrive — making your workflow even more seamless.
At Kami, we’re dedicated to supporting our learning community through free resources and training across all channels. Our team values all feedback and suggestions, so thank you for continuing to share them with us.
It’s been an incredible school year and we can’t wait to see you for an even more exciting 2021-2022 year ahead!
