Thursday, March 8, 2012

Social Networking for Education

I really do. If you haven't heard, Edmodo is a free social networking platform for teachers and students. (Think Facebook for school.) I learned about the site at FETC last year, and my ITS department loves it for professional development and classroom use. Here are a few reasons why:

  • Teachers can use Edmodo to ask questions, post resources, collaborate, etc. professionally. We have several district groups here, and the Edmodo community has groups by interest.
  • Teachers can set up a controlled social space with students to have discussions, post and receive assignments, give polls and quizzes, and more. (The embed feature is great. Students can share videos, animations, and digital flash cards easily.)
  • Students join groups with the code from the teacher. They can private message the teacher, but not other students. 
  • Students join and leave groups themselves - there's no management for the teacher on setting up student accounts. (They can also enter a phone number to get text updates or use the app.)
  • The teacher can moderate the feed for any group they create several different ways.
Training: Here is a comic-style poster that I made as an intro to my district, Edmodo's help page, and a Power Point on Netiquette. Feel free to use anything you need. Got a question about Edmodo or our district rollout? Leave a post.

No comments:

Post a Comment