In our last discussion board post, we were asked to consider the educational and motivational value of a CMS. I commented on the extraordinary connection I felt with Full Sail instructors and fellow students despite our lack of face time, and imagined how many ways my fifth graders would benefit from some sort of modified CMS or other online tools that would establish a collaborative cohort experience at their level.
In the past 2 years, I've attempted to establish online assignments on my class page of our school's website. My desire was to have my students reflect on a real-life topic or situation that connected to our current studies in some way, and enter into a threaded discussion with their classmates, independent of my direction beyond the initial question or comment I posted. Of course I read it each night, added devil's-advocate kinds of comments on posts to sneakily force them to support their point of view more fully, and monitored their interaction. We had discussions regarding respectful disagreement, how best to express a point of view in writing and how to "state it and support it". The experience itself had real potential and truly lit a fire in most of the children because they could respond to each other as well as to my topic. However, the platforms I experimented with were confusing for my students (Moodle) or far too simplistic (the built-in message board on my class page). While both offered a type of threaded discussion, neither was as polished as I'd like in terms of group management, such as creation of smaller groups for collaborative projects and sharing of links, documents and other materials that a group might use as they worked together. Because of their age, I must keep them in one closed arena and not send them out to other Web 2.0 sites, for activities such as document sharing, that require them to establish accounts.
This year's class is going to have a whole new experience; once I'd added Go2Web20 on my box of links on iGoogle last weekend, I checked it out and there was Edmodo! I established an account; signing up is simple and straight-forward. Once you sign up as a teacher, you're given the option of creating groups. Each group is assigned an access code that I can give to my students. They can be identified by first names only, or even a code name I set up with them, so the privacy is immediately much deeper than Moodle. (Moodle required that they be identified by a school email address, so we were forced to give all 5th graders an email account on our server.) Edmodo offers children a way to have threaded discussions in real time, like Google Wave. It's easy for children to begin their own discussion topic as well within the established framework. Edmodo is the perfect platform to teach educational use of social media itself; how to respond respectfully, keep on topic and use the experience productively.
The appearance is pure Facebook, which means less to 5th graders, hopefully. However, the social media aspects of it are appropriate for a school setting, as are its features such as a library for sharing and saving documents, links and files, and a calendar so the class has access to a consistently updated calendar as assignments and events are added.
The teacher dashboard is visually well-organized and easy to use. I can add all of my students to the group I created, and then break them into smaller groups each time we do small-group projects and presentations for math or social studies.
Edmodo's guide, too, is comprehensive but easy to navigate. Teachers who have less tech experience could use Edmodo with ease, unlike Moodle which was often baffling for those without some experience in online navigation.
This Web 2.0 tool is the perfect first step to my AR project with my class this year; in my pursuit of digital storytelling experiences for my students in a wide variety of formats, Edmodo will afford them opportunities to collaborate in small groups online, discuss in real time, share documents and increase their sense of responsibility and autonomy in their own learning experiences. I'm expecting some great things to come out of Edmodo for my class and for my AR project, and I can't wait to get it rolling! I'll be introducing it to my class next week. Stay tuned...
This web site is very awesome. I was using a similar site called, class jump, which became volatile. The layout as you stated are very similar to Facebook and the applications of this site are very user friendly. After reading your post my appreciation for blogging and aggregating information pushes me into this network of sharing information.
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