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Better Answers

By posted December 19, 2011

Since first announcing Grockit Answers in October, we’ve improved our video collaboration tool in a number of ways. These changes were driven largely by the feedback that we received from teachers and students, so keep it coming! Below are video clips (in 1080p HD!) demonstrating six of these recent improvements:

Discussions are now live-updating!

When groups of students are watching the same video at the same time, newly-posted questions and answers are live-updated on all connected viewers.

Embed video search results into another website

When you search for a video on Grockit Answers, you can now embed the results onto your own webpage, like this:

Here’s a short video explaining how to do this:

Start moderating classroom discussions faster

Moderation controls are now more readily-accessible, simplifying the process for a teacher to get started using Grockit Answers in their classroom.

Share videos and questions with your students through Edmodo

Any video, question, or answer on the site can now be shared with others through Edmodo.

Teachers and moderators now receive activity updates

Once a day, teachers and others who moderate videos will now receive an update listing all new Q&A activity on those videos:

Grockit Answers now powers all Grockit video courses!

You’ll now find Grockit Answers powering SAT and GMAT video courses. Grockit Answers also now provides opportunity to ask questions and offer help around every question video explanation on the site, both in reviews and in solo game explanations. Thousands of Grockit video discussions, added earlier this week:



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Answering the question that you’re about to ask

By posted October 17, 2011

We’re happy to announce the newest addition to the Grockit social learning platform: Grockit Answers, a tool for hosting timely Q&A discussions around web videos. We started by designing this for our own videos, but quickly decided that it could have more impact if we expanded our scope a bit. So as of today, Grockit Answers works with any video hosted on YouTube or Vimeo.

There’s a wealth of educational videos available online, but the primary mode of interaction among viewers — short-form commenting — doesn’t do much to enhance or facilitate learning. When you’re trying to grok a challenging lecture from an AI course at Stanford or an open talk at MIT, you need more than comments. You need a way to ask a question about a particular point that confused you, or ask for a clarification or maybe a useful reference on something mentioned in the video. You really need a Q&A site, and you need to be able to attach each of your questions to a particular time in the video. You need Grockit Answers. Here’s a quick video clip (live Q&A discussion here). Feel free to ask questions about this video on Grockit Answers.

Built on Popcorn.js, a fantastic new HTML5 media framework for better connecting web videos to web pages, Grockit Answers displays each question and its answers at the exact point in the video that they are most relevant. As a viewer, some of the things that confuse you are are likely to be the same as what confused others before you. In a time-anchored Q&A on Grockit Answers, just as the question begins to form in your mind, it may magically pop up on the screen, along with a few great answers.

For the educators out there, I’m happy to say that we developed a number of additional features with you in mind. You can create a Q&A page on a video that only you and your students have access to, and you can moderate the conversation to get additional controls and deeper insight into what’s happening. Finally, and most exciting, you can add these Q&A pages to your own course websites (example), easily replacing links to YouTube or Vimeo videos with your moderated discussions. Feel free to contact us at answers@grockit.com with any questions about this.


Start a Question & Answer page for any video on YouTube. Share it with your classroom or share it with your friends. And please, let us know what you think.

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How I Use Pivotal Tracker for GTD

By posted January 14, 2009

I’ve been using (and talking about) the GTD system for about three years, and along the way I’ve tried a variety of tools ranging from the most basic (paper) to the most sophisticated (humans) to help capture and manage my tasks.

For the better part of Grockit‘s existence, we’ve been using Pivotal Tracker to manage our agile software development process. Without question, it’s the best organizational tool for agile development teams we’ve seen, and we consider it an essential part of our productivity.

I’m working on a series of blog entries showing how we use it at Grockit for software development, but thought I’d show how you could use Tracker as a personal GTD-style task manager.

Here’s a very fast and light tour of some of the Tracker basics with a bias towards using it as a GTD system. If you’re a software developer and practice or want to practice agile software development, keep an eye out for a series of more extensive tours in the near future.

Pivotal Tracker as a GTD tool from Michael Buffington on Vimeo.

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Introducing CCToaster

By posted December 24, 2008

Hi! My name is Kunal and I’m an engineer at Grockit!

At Grockit, we practice eXtreme Programming (XP). No – not that kind of extreme. We are however very serious about testing code. Our process of delivering a clean build to our target environments hinges on a continuous integration (CI) tool called CruiseControl.rb. Confused? Don’t worry – I’ll explain!

After every commit to our Git repository, CruiseControl.rb wakes up from its slumber and starts running all the designated integration tests. For us, that means Ruby, JavaScript, concurrency, and selenium specs. If we’re “green,” meaning that all of our tests passed, then our commit is tagged and worthy of being deployed to a testing environment. If we’re “red,” meaning that a test failed, then the offending Grockiteer has to fix the glitch. CruiseControl.rb has helped us maintain a high level of quality whenever we want to put a feature in front of our users.

CruiseControl.rb works just fine when the build and development team size is small. As Grockit continues to iterate and release, both variables have increased in scope and size:

  • Business logic and tests are directly proportional. We write our tests before we write a line of code. When our system complexity increases, the number of tests, and therefore the amount of time it takes to run CruiseControl.rb also increases.
  • More engineers = more checkins! In between long CI builds, lots of changesets tend to accumulate in the ether, making it harder to determine the results of your changeset. It’s just not productive to search for needles in haystacks.

To help improve our CI process, I built a tool called CCToaster. CCToaster is an OS X menulet that displays the current status of CruiseControl.rb. Here is what the tool looks like in your status bar:

The icon color denotes the state of CruiseControl – green = success, red = fail, black = unknown. The neatest feature of CCToaster is the ability to track a changeset’s status. Here is what the interface looks like:

And of course, there are preferences:

As you can see, it’s very lightweight and easy to use. If you are interested in downloading the binary or checking out the source code of the project, head on over to the CCToaster Git repository. The application was written in PyObjc and was tested on Leopard (10.5).

Feel free to shoot me an email if you need help setting this tool up for your environment. I hope you enjoy using this application and learning more about the Grockit process.

Farb & Kunal pair posted this on December 24, 2008

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