WHY I LOVE EDMODO

What makes you passionate about Edmodo:

I cannot describe how much easier Edmodo has made my teaching! At the beginning of my career as a teacher in the Middle East in the year 2013, and in my capacity as an English and Social Studies teacher I had to make e-learning relevant to the students as expected by the 21st-century learning. Now in my capacity as a Subject Leader for ESL for KS3, I am involved in a whole-school effort to rollout Edmodo. It is catching up though not like wildfire! I have staff approaching me every day wanting to learn more and find out ways to use it better.

In my school, we have all year levels using the Edmodo. Most of the teachers have an Edmodo account to upload support material which helps parents to support their children.  I generally teach the middle years. Therefore, my focus is usually on Year 7 and 8, and as Subject Leader, English is my focus. 

I will try to list the many ways I use Edmodo, and why I love it so much:

1.       It is now very easy to share a worksheet or handout with my students on Edmodo.

2.       Students can easily download a document from Edmodo and then upload it again onto Edmodo to submit it as an ‘assignment’. This solves the whole ‘work-flow’ problem that many teachers face. Worksheets, handouts, task sheets, graphic organizers, anything you want the students to work on, just upload it into your library, add it to a folder that you share with the students or attach it to a post, then they access it. Once they have finished, they need to upload it into their ‘backpacks’ and then submit it as an attachment to an ‘assignment’ that you posted.

3.       Edmodo’s ‘assignment’ feature allows me to post an assignment with a due date and a task sheet, see who submitted it and when, mark it using a PDF annotation tool, grade/assess it and give feedback all in one neat place. It really is hassle-free!

4.       Edmodo’s ‘quiz’ feature allows me to create really quick and simple quizzes to use in class. Creating the quiz is really simple, and I can use multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blanks, matching, or even short answer questions. It also shows you some really cool statistics about the students’ answers.

5.       Edmodo’s ‘poll’ feature allows me create quick survey polls in class and can be a very valuable formative assessment tool. It has been very useful in my class to help me decide what students may need to focus on more for the coming lessons, or what sort of format would they prefer to submit their assignment as, among many more polls.

6.       Edmodo’s ‘note’ feature has been a great help in creating exit slips for the students. Right before the lesson ends, the students are asked to write ‘one thing I learned today is…’ or ‘one thing that surprised me today was…’ or ‘one thing I’d like to find out more about is…’. After posting their exit slips, they can all see what the others have posted and may be comment on each other’s posts and respond.

7.       Edmodo’s ‘members’ feature allows me to manage my students in each class/group. This has been very handy in reminding a student of their username in case they forgot it while logging in again, or resetting their password if they can’t remember it, or even changing a student’s member-status to ‘read-only’ if they have been posting too much irrelevant content and abusing the posting feature. I can also use this feature to award ‘badges’ to my students, which is a great incentive for many of them.

8.       Edmodo’s ‘small groups’ feature makes group-work a lot easier to manage and assess. In my drama classroom, students are arranged in small groups or ‘theatre companies’, and a lot of their brainstorming is done on Edmodo, or even simply documenting group-work in a virtual group-work log.

9.       Edmodo’s ‘folders’ feature makes it very easy to organize documents in a folder and share that folder with my classes. Standard templates like reflection help-sheets or rubrics can be placed in these folders so students can have access to them anytime.

10.   Edmodo has made it much easier to teach ‘digital citizenship’ skills in a safer and more controlled environment. Having a strong social-networking aspect to it, Edmodo allows the teacher to model appropriate online behaviour and etiquette and gives the students the opportunity to practice those skills in a teacher-controlled environment.

11.   Edmodo Spotlight helps you boost your lesson planning and find resources to spark your students’ curiosity and improve their overall learning experience.

12.   Empowering teachers is the only path to getting better outcomes.  Teacher Leader Network is doing exactly the same.