Saturday, May 21, 2011

Do you edmodo?

Looking for a fantastic way to extend your physical classroom into an online space? You can't go past edmodo.  If you haven't heard of it yet, you could say edmodo is like Facebook for the classroom (that's how the students see it), but that would be scratching the surface of what you can do with edmodo.  Like Facebook, edmodo is a free online social networking application that young people love to use, however unlike Facebook, it has a strong privacy and security model, designed specifically for the classroom.

I've been using edmodo for nearly half a year now and can't say enough good things about it. So much so, a few colleagues and I felt it was time to set up the Edmodo Teacher Hub wikispace to share our experiences and teaching ideas. It's still early days, but already some teachers have shared amazing stories - my favorite is this story about using edmodo to support a student voice program. Coming from a computer systems background, I'm particularly impressed how the edmodo designers extended physical classroom management practices to implement secure virtual classrooms - something I wrote about in the article Is edmodo safe for schools?

Do you have an edmodo story to share or an idea to share? All contributions welcome!

Disclaimer: The edmodo teacher hub wiki is not officially related to edmodo in any way. Views expressed are those of individual teacher contributors and not necessarily those of their employers.


* A special thank you to Bianca Hewes, our resident Australian edmodo evangelist for encouraging and helping set up the wikispace (and designing the logo!)

2 comments:

  1. Hey Nordin, do you have any useful links or suggestions when using Edmodo? I am still a newbie in this, and I am going to try and use Edmodo with my classes soon (now that I have tried both Moodle AND Edutone, and both have failed to engage me and the students). Cheers!

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  2. Apart from "dive in and try it" :-), have a read through the edmodo teacher hub wiki. See if there are any other teachers at your school or in your area using edmodo and ask to see what they do. Your students may have tech-fatigue given their previous experiences, so perhaps find a very tangible and practical reason to use it at the start, rather than just seeing what will happen if you provide it.

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