I found Edmodo through a blog or twitter post about a year ago. After doing some research I realized that it would work well in our grade five classrooms during Exhibition. I completed one of their webinars, though I don’t feel it was necessary to understand how it works and what the major elements of it are.
Edmodo is a place where teachers can share resources with students, post and grade assignments, create polls, quizzes, and announcements. All teachers need to do is create their own account, which is free. Once they have done this they create classes. They are given a code which they can give to students or teachers to use to join the group. When a student creates and account or joins a group with that code they are automatically added to that group. Teacher can have multiple classes connected to their Edmodo accounts. Within those classes, teachers can have small groups as well. So a grade five teacher may create a grade five group. Then a small group for each section of grade five, a modern language group, guided reading and/or math group. This list could go on.
When a teacher posts something on Edmodo they can choose to address it to the whole grade 5 group, one of the smaller groups, or individuals.
Another great feature is that teachers can schedule posts. This allows you to create a post when you are planning but to not send it to your students until they have been taught it.
The teacher log in gives you access to a “library” This is a cloud based storage area within Edmodo. It is a great place to store resources that you want kids to access because you can link items in your library to posts and assignments. The students also have this but it is called their “backpack”
Another aspect that students like are the badges. You can create badges of your own, or “steal’ them from other teachers. The kids seem to like the badges and are certain to let you know if you missed giving them one!
Edmodo allows for collaboration with students as well. You can create groups where students from different grades, schools, or countries can join and collaborate together. At our school our grade 6 students created videos about digital citizenship that they wanted to share with grade 5. So we created a group and now they are sharing and commenting on each other’s work. This could easily be done with groups from different schools and countries.
Photo credit: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/16/Edmodo_logo.svg
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