Extend your classroom with Edmodo

Let’s suppose that you work at a school that’s light on the IT side of things. They don’t have fancy “content management” software such as Sakai or Moodle. You’ve thought of using a blog to communicate with your students in some sort of topic. But when you really think about it, there ought to be a way to easily share links, files, messages, and even assignments … permanently. Why re-invent the wheel everytime a unit comes up that has a very pertinent tech link?

Enter Edmodo.com

Overview

On the face of it, it seems like Facebook. And that might frighten some educators away. Because you instantly think of things like “friending,” uncontrollable comments, kids being addicted to the click click culture. But Edmodo has found the line between being useful and not overwhelming us with the social networking features that can spell trouble in a learning environment.

It’s a blog/social combination website that lets you share stuff. The killer feature from this opinionated eye is that the kids (or “participants” if you’re in higher-ed) can’t send private messages to each other. Sure, they can start conversations and they can chat away like one does on Facebook. But everything said is viewable by everyone. So they physically cannot do the cyber equivalent of whispering in someone’s ear, and there’s little of chance of the conversation becoming too casual or off-topic when the teacher — and everyone else — is watching. It puts into relief the good design philosophy that probably surrounded the erection of a really solid learning tool: Don’t do anything that will make teacher’s life more difficult.

The following will get you up and running within two minutes: You register, free, as a teacher. Then you create a group, and Edmodo provides a random code of characters and numbers. You tell the class to go to Edmodo, where they also register for free, and join the group by typing the code. Instantly, you have yourself a virtual classroom. You can post notes, share links, provide files, and even write … and grade! … assignments. Polls? Yep, that’s taken care of as well.

My own experience with Edmodo is that the kids took an instant liking to it, and have used it beyond the intended means. These teenagers were smart and registered as a teacher, and created their own groups. This is probably something that some may find to be a problem, but from the point of view that the real test of a useable and successful piece of tech tool is if boundaries are tested, it’s a measuring stick that results in a big thumbs-up. My colleagues even started up groups that communicate, and committees started adapting it as the communication devise, which quickly become more preferred over email.

That’s the only real potential down-side. Students could potentially start up groups of their own. The path of least resistence available to you as a way to combat this is to offer to set up groups for them, in which case you’d have the opportunity to either monitor it yourself or refer it to the appropriate channels. You may even find your discussions in class leading into the creation of a group to discuss in more detail some hobby they share in common. You’ll find yourself potentially depending on Edmodo to share stuff, making it a natural extension to what you already do effectively. With potentiality like that, it’s worth documenting how to do things in Edmodo.

Navigating the Interface

How often does this happen: There’s a test coming up and so you provide a MS Word document that details the sort of questions that are going to appear. You hand it out, but someone’s absent. Then there’s the kid who stuffs most things into his textbook, and you know he’s going to lose it. Well, if you simply share the file on Edmodo (on top of all the teacher-ish admonishions about being responsible), the students simply do not have an excuse when it comes to excuse-making time. You can essentially make all your course’s content online. In addition, you have gained a one-stop shop for your students to refer to should confusion ever reign.

Posting a note is dead easy, only slightly harder is sharing a file. You click on the File button in the “Post Bubble” at the top of your screen. The Post Bubble automatically reformats itself so that you have the appropriate fields ready. Browse to the location on your computer, and it’ll automatically start uploading for you. Type up a title for the file, and when you click send it’ll either post immediately, or else will wait for the file to completely upload. The kids often respond with a thanks, which they do by clicking on the “Reply” box. I use the reply feature on my own posts for the fine print, an appropriate term here because all comments appear in a smaller, but handsome, font size. Link sharing works the same way. Click on “Link” and paste the URL into the field. Wait a few moments, and then the title field will automatically call itself whatever the title of the webpage is. (Love it!)

Edmodo's Post Bubble: Where you'll spend most of your time.

The assignment tool is not quite as easy; unlike the above it does take some training on both parties to get it to be utilized appropriately. This is one of those cases, where, even though the user interface is pretty simple and clear, there’s a behavior that needs to be learned that hasn’t been internalized even if you use other social networking sites. (Imagine your Facebook friends giving you assignments?) It works a lot like posts, but this time users can click on “Turn in” when it’s time to hand in their homework. Where the behavior goes wrong is that students often send you a file (using the file sharing feature) instead of clicking on “Turn in.” I’ve even had students send a note to the class with their assignment as the post, which everyone could see. So, it may take some coaxing and explanations when you first try it out; expect that anyway.

But if you do train the students to use the Turn In feature, you have the chance to review their work and assign it a numerical value in the form of “x/y.” When you grade, they are informed of the result, and I’ve had students instantly post their responses at 9 at night to the grade they’ve received via Edmodo. You can see who hasn’t turned in, and there’s even a calendar that will keep track of all their assignment due dates.

There are a some limitations with the grading feature, and is probably best limited to casual marking only. For one thing, you cannot tell Edmodo you’d like to use a particular format for the results. Suppose your schools requires, say, a letter grade (for quality) and a number grade (for effort), you’re stuck. Here, you must give it a “x out of y” style grade. This is a deal-breaker for most educationalists out there, but given Edmodo’s track record of incorporating user feedback it’s reasonable to expect that they may have something up their sleeve.

Other Snips

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Easier than Email

If you know how to use email effectively, Edmodo will, for the most part, feel as simple and as effective. Better, actually.

It is clear that the Edmodo staff are toying with additional features, which they document in their blog. But as with any proper tool we always worry that they won’t go and take away its value by adding cruft. They recently initiated a “Connections” tool whereby you can see what kind of activity your colleagues are up to, but since there wasn’t any obvious privacy statement I spent an hour playing around with it to see if it was possible for, say, a teacher upstairs to see a post made by a student downstairs in another class. I would consider that a problem because I wouldn’t be able to guarantee the fact that it’s a closed community, and it might also mean that my colleagues could be “checking up” on things without my knowledge. I wrote to the Edmodo staff (using Edmodo, just type “Edmodo” in the to field) expressing my concern and they got back to me in just a few hours, assuring me that, no, only those who know the group code can see any of the student- or teacher-produced text. They CAN see things that are already publically available, like websites. Yet I don’t really understand why that is all that useful to me. So what if my colleague “posted a message to chemistry class”?

Other features worth mentioning are the Notifications and the Library. The Library is mis-named; it’s actually a resource history. What it does is gives you a list of all the resources (files, links, whatever) so that you can easily get at them just by looking through a pleasantly-formated list. And if you’re re-posting stuff (which you’ll do the next time you teach a unit), you can refer to it from the history rather than re-pasting or re-uploading. This one right there is valuable. You’re also creating an easily accessible backup of your teaching-based files!

One failed feature: Tags are supposed to be a way for each kid to organize their own work, but it seems to me that teachers ought to be assigning tags to items that cannot change. Sure, users themselves should be able to stick colors on certain posts, or tag them with particular phrases, but that’s an entirely different beast. Teachers should categorize them, while kids should tag them. The result is that it’s far less useful than it easily could be.

Final Tally

Edmodo just rocks. So it’s hard not to give it the highest grade: “Insane.” It has its pitfalls but it Works The Way It’s Supposed To. It’ll expand your ability to reach out to your class. In the months since using it there have been some minor access problems but I’ve not once lost a single thing or even a single day of Edmodo-ing. The support staff are friendly and respond instantly and it’s a simple matter to contact. It’s hard to imagine delivering my lessons without it now.

Oh! Didn’t I mention? It’s completely free.–text follows this line–