In a world where social media technology is growing rapidly, it is important for educators to embrace this technology so it benefits education as opposed to becoming an enemy of education. An effective social/collaboration Web 2.o tool for this purpose is Edmodo. Edmodo is mix between blogging and twitter with an educational slant. An educator creates a teacher account and sets up a “group” which essentially acts as the classroom. Posting in the classroom is much like posting on twitter, but instead of short bursts of text, you can write up long messages, embed videos, add polls, files, etc (hence why Edmodo is also like blogging). I personally liked the filtering options that Edmodo provides. In any size class working in Edmodo, posts will start to add up fast. What Edmodo allows you to do is a nondestructive filtering of posts based on a subject like just polls or just videos, etc. Filtering allows the user to more quickly find a specific post in jumbled mess of posts.
While you wouldn’t hold a full class on Edmodo, Edmodo does work as a classroom out side the classroom. The teacher can post assignments, reference materials and any additional comments to facilitate projects and class lessons. Students can provide feedback, ask questions and post any material they might have researched that they want to share and discuss. A possibly underrated benefit to Edmodo is the relative safety of the site. School administrators and parents might be more at ease allowing students to socialize and work on Edmodo (because it is controlled by the teacher only) as opposed to trying to set up a classroom in Facebook or other social site. Teachers can also post YouTube videos to Edmodo without having to send students to YouTube or worry about them reading potentially derogatory video replies.
Like Twitter, Edmodo is fairly minimalistic with a small learning curve. It shouldn’t be too “scary” for teachers hesitant about technology. With students already into the world of social media, they should enjoy Edmodo and pick up on it quick.
Good information Josh. I think Edmodo could be very beneficial int he classroom. The thing i like about it that you found is the fact that the teacher has administrative capability to control the information flow on the site. But the students and parents can still as part of the group, log on and view any assignments they have posted. I agree this also helps with younger student as well logging on and may ease the parents sensitivity to social networking since it is controlled by the teacher.
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