I've found that children really like joining groups on Edmodo - probably because it makes them happy when they feel they belong to lots of different communities.
A couple of weeks ago I created a 'book reviews' group for my school in which children could write and share reviews of any books that they have enjoyed reading recently. Since then it has become very popular and nearly every day I now see a new review being added to it by a pupil - indeed, it's turning into a fantastic way of promoting and improving children's enjoyment of reading books for pleasure.
To make everyone aware of the group's presence, I asked a couple of eager children to each design a poster advertising it and explaining how it could be joined (i.e. what the group code was). This helped to put a bit of child-ownership on the project and seemed to be a great way of attracting members who would likely be more interested in promotion by a friend their age than by an adult.
In order to keep the group's message stream tidy and free from distracting 'chat', I opted to implement the new 'moderate posts' setting in Edmodo. This means that all messages sent to the group are held for moderation by the owner (in this case me) before they appear. Any new reviews/replies that aren't good enough quality I simply delete before others get the chance to read them.
To encourage good review writing, however, I ensured that the first message posted to the group contained my expectations and success criteria for what features should be included and I also created a badge to reward to those who successfully follow them.
Although I use Evernote on a daily basis to bookmark useful websites and clip interesting articles/lesson ideas to build up an enormous bank of resources, it isn't the most tidy of places as I literally just save there quickly knowing that I can find it again later by doing a keyword/tag search. I do share this collection with people online and in school but I've never really seen it used much because it's not that visually attractive and can sometimes seem a little overwhelming due to she sheer amount of stuff on it.
For these reasons, I also store duplicates of my favourite resources on Edmodo using their 'Library' tool. You can upload documents (up to 100mb) in size as well as save links to websites and embeddable content (e.g. YouTube videos). From the Library itself, you can only add resources individually one at a time however by sending a message to yourself on the main Edmodo screen with lots of attachments, you also can add multiple resources at once.
You can search for specific documents in your library by doing a key words search as well as filter items to just view those: of a particular type, attached to posts from a particular group or added to the library directly.
In addition, you can also organise your items neatly by creating folders to put them in. Once a new folder has been created, you can then either add an item to it directly or you can share the same item across multiple folders by using the tick-list that appears when you click on a item - this can be useful for items that you feel might be useful being placed in several locations. The order of items in a folder can be rearranged by simply dragging items around to their desired locations.
Folders can be shared on a read-only basis with any of your groups - I find this helpful since you can share items on topics specific to particular year groups to provide them with a collection of relevent resources that they access any time that they want.
The main benefits of using Edmodo to store resouces though I think are:
'previews' of documents and thumbnail images of websites are generated automatically which makes it easy for you and your children to see exactly what's in a folder;
the 'play view' mode enables you to view folder items full screen and flick between them quite easily;
there is unlimited storage space.
Creating a resource library on Edmodo is completely free - there are no ads and no premium add-ons. It's extremely easy to add and organise items on it and I've found that people find it extremely intuitive to use.
I was exploring the Memiary website earlier today and got thinking about how Edmodo could be used in a similar way by the children in a class to collaborate to create a online, daily diary of their learning.
It's extremely easy to set up - all you have to do is remember to post a message your class group each day for the children to reply to.
In this example, I've asked the question 'What did you learn today?' and the children could respond with what:
learning objectives they have met;
new aspects of topics they have learnt;
targets they have achieved;
discoveries they have made.
To encourage them to write a reply each day, you could perhaps reward them with a badge if they do it every day in a week.
Over time, these replies would gradually build up to create a large collection of their memories. To help keep them organised, each message could be 'tagged' so that each of the diary posts could be filtered out from the 'everything' stream. This tag could be shared with your groups too - if you send each day's diary question out to several groups separately you would see all the posts under this tag whilst the children in each group would only see the posts sent to their group.
At the end of each week/month/term/year, you could look back on these memories with your children and review what they have: learnt, achieved and remembered. This could even be used to assess their ability to accurately recall knowledge and understanding of topics or to refresh their skills relating to particular concepts.
What a great way for children to keep track of their learning experiences!
Here in the UK we have a government-backed organisation called CEOP(the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre) that provides children with: advice, guidance and, if required, the ability to report online crime. They encourage owners of popular websites to include a link to their 'Click CEOP' button which children can easily click on to access a variety of their online e-safety resources - I obviously registered with them to be able to put it onto my school's website.
When I launched Edmodo in my school I made sure that all the children clearly understood my behaviour expectations when using the website, as well as the actions which would be taken if they were broken. I even created a mini poster reminding them how to stay safe on Edmodo and set it up on my website so that children automatically see it for ten seconds before being redirected to the main Edmodo login screen.
An idea which I had last night that other Edmodo users might be interested in to further promote e-safety amongst their students is to create a dedicated e-safety group for them to join. For my school it would simply contain three posts - one with a picture of the 'Zip it! Block it! Flag it!' slogan promoted here in the UK, one with a link on to the fabulous ThinkuKnow website (which contains e-safety games for them to play/information for them to read) and another with a a link on to the CEOP 'report' website.
To get students to join the group and see the links I would just send the group code to them as an alert. I wouldn't force anyone to join the group, however the incentive of being rewarded with a badge when they did would hopefully encourage them to.
This would be the only real admin task associated with the group but could be done quite straightforwardly each time I receive notification of new members having joined in my spotlight - all new members would be set to read-only access automatically so that all that they can actually do in the group is click on the links (and so not send messages). I did consider creating a folder in my library with the links in and just sharing it with each of the class groups but felt that creating a new group instead would make them appear in a more visually prominent place on the screen - as well as make it easier for me to see who has opted to access them so that I can reward them with a badge.
By creating a dedicated e-safety group it will hopefully help to make Edmodo users at my school feel more confident in their online behaviours as well as provide them with an easy way to access any advice/support should they need it.
I'd love to read what thoughts anyone else has on this idea!
Put simply, Edmodo just allows students to send messages to the rest of their class as a whole 'group' - they can't send private (direct) messages to each other. In my opinion, this therefore makes Edmodo an extremely safe environment in which children can communicate with their peers as it means that because everyone can read what they've written, then they are less likely to post anything which is nasty/unsuitable. This is especially important considering that messages don't have to be moderated before being published - they appear instantly in the timeline, thus enabling children to take part in their own free-flowing discussion without having to wait for a teacher to logon some time later to start 'approving' work (which in my experience I've found puts children off).
Recently I've read comments from people expressing their opinion that they would like Edmodo to introduce adult-moderated private messaging between students. Again, in my opinion, I don't think that sucha a feature is necessary as it would mean that greater pressure would be put on me (and other staff in school) to take time checking through these messages to ensure that they are all nice and friendly - it would be particularly annoying too if they were just random chats using text language that would be more likely to happen in conversations between just two individuals. If a child has their own personal email account or mobile phone at home (with parental consent/responsibility) then I feel that using it for such a conversation would be much more appropriate instead.
Indeed, the Edmodo team themselves seem to back this opinion up by constantly stating that they have no intentions to introduce private messaging between students. They do, however, recognise that there is a need to offer students the ability to write to audiences which are smaller than the class as a whole by offering three great, little tools as alternatives:
all groups/people who receive a message can write a reply to it - this means that if a teacher sends a message to multiple groups/multiple individual students then either children in all the groups specified or just the named children can have a discussion amongst themselves using the reply button;
teachers can set up small groups within whole class groups - these place students into smaller sets so meaning that they can either send messages to the whole class group or just their small group set which they have been placed in (perhaps useful for things like: reading groups, project work or discussions/debates as part of Kagan structures classroom environment);
a 'group instant messaging' feature is apparently being developed - hopefully offering similar functionality to what is available alongside collaborative Primary Pad or GoogleDocs dcouments.
Finally, it's also worth me pointing out to you an article that I recently read on an American website which highlights why using Edmodo in schools is important "to boost communication, collaboration, and students’ confidence" - http://is.gd/gJlc2y.
I'm sure many of you would agree with me when I say that children love collecting things and comparing their collections with their friends - especially with whatever the latest 'in' toy is at the moment (it was Mini Trolls at my school just before the summer, for example).
The creators of Edmodo seemed to have spotted this and as such introduced a new feature today to their website for students called 'badges'.
When you now click on a child's avatar picture, you are taken to their profile page and can see what badges they have been awarded by their teachers. Children can get recognition for their achievements and can compare their collections with others to see what other badges they can aim to get rewarded with next.
There are a few generic badges already available for teachers to give to pupils (e.g. to recognise good attendance), however you can create your own to build up a collection of different badges more specifically suited to your children and your school.
I've been having a quick go at designing some badges this afternoon and the ideas that I have come up with so far are to reward children who have:
learnt how to attach an image to a message;
learnt how to attach a web link to a message;
turned in a homework 'assignment' from home;
consistently used good spellings in their messages;
changed their avatar picture from the default picture;
won the merit award given out in school each week to one child from each class;
posted a message on Edmodo whilst in a different country (as I had a reception pupil login whilst on his holiday to Canada yesterday).
At the moment these are fairly 'serious' badges but I am considering creating some extra more 'fun' badges to reward children with every time they collect an extra 10 badges - this should hopefully keep the children keen to continue working towards reaching new milestones and thus prevent the system from becoming stale.
I can see a huge potential in using badges to try and encourage children to engage with Edmodo more from home and produce quality work on it. I look forward to seeing how successful they become when the new term starts in September!
I've spoken in the past about the benefits of using Edmodo with school children, however I got thinking today about how the website could be exploited by school staff for use as online staff community (or staff room if you prefer).
It's very straightforward to set up - just create a new group in Edmodo and share its code with all your colleagues so that they can join it. Teachers can then easily send messages to this staff group with just a few clicks - this can sometimes be preferable to sending messages to 'all connections' since some things might be very school specific which you don't want to share with the wider audience of your PLN.
Some ways of using this staff group could include:
collaborating with colleagues on new teaching/planning ideas - especially useful during out-of-school hours like during school 'holidays';
sending alerts to remind staff of important things happening in school that they need to take imminent action on;
uploading the weekly staff news bulletin to the group so that everyone can access it and be sure to have a copy - especially part-time staff who are not in school on the day it get handed out;
sharing folders from your documents library to create an online repository of valuable resources - whether they be: PowerPoint presentations linked to topics, classroom resources (e.g. number lines for printing out) or school-specific templates (e.g. the report writing pro-forma);
subscribing the group to educational news feeds (e.g. Teaching News) so that new posts appear in each staff member's timeline automatically to highlight current events to them.
These are just a few ideas but hopefully it helps you realise the many different benefits encouraging your staff to join their own special Edmodo has.
How do your staff use Edmodo to help with their school work?
Last week my deputy head put a writing task on Edmodo for KS2 - within four days, 42 children had chosen, in their own free time at break or at home, to complete it! They weren't forced, it wasn't formally set as homework - they just decided themselves that they wanted to do it.
To say that Edmodo is a success at my school would be putting it mildly. Since my last post (view here), I've managed to get about half of KS1 signed up too and have even had children who are off ill logging in at home during the day.
Having had more time to explore Edmodo, I can now explain some of the tools I overlooked last time, as well as give you some useful little tips I've discovered to help get the most out of Edmodo.
Firstly, let me talk about 'assignments'. As a teacher, you can set an assignment to be completed by either one group or multiple groups. You send it by filling in the message form (including attaching any pictures/files) and setting a due date for it to be completed by. It appears in each child's timeline, as well as in the 'spotlight' area in the top-right of the screen to remind them that it needs to be done.
To complete an assignment, children have to click on the 'turn in' button on the assignment description before typing their work in (and upload any pictures/files) - they shouldn't do it by replying to the message.
Once an assignment has been completed, it appears in the teacher's mark book to say that it has been turned in. The group creator and any co-teachers can grade the work by giving it a mark (we've been setting writing tasks to the whole of KS2 and giving marks out of 5, based on National Curriculum levelling), as well as give feedback by adding a comment to it.
As Edmodo is aimed at all sectors of the education system, assignments that have been turned in can only be viewed by: the group creator, co-teachers, each child in question and any parents associated with them. Whilst this has the advantage of preventing children from cheating by looking at what each other has done, it has the disadvantage of children not being able see each other's work and comment on it. To get around this though, I had the idea of publishing a good piece of work completed by a child in each class onto the school website- this lets children aim to do the best they can so that it gets shared with a worldwide audience and also makes it so that they only see good examples of work to model their own ideas from (rather than just looking at their friends, which might not be that good).
Moving on, teachers can also send 'alerts' to groups - these are messages which contain only text and which appear in the timeline in a larger font to highlight their importance. Edmodo says that you are limited to 140 characters, although this doesn't seem to be the case. It's worth pointing out that sending a message/alert to multiple groups means that children from different groups can all reply to it and get a little discussion/conversation going - this might be something you want to allow but if you don't, the only workaround is to send the message to each group separately.
Any files/links/embed codes attached by a teacher to a message are automatically added to their online library/storage area (you can also upload to the library directly too if you wish). At the moment there aren't any storage limits, although uploads are limited to 100mb - this, in my opinion, makes it a fantastic place to store documents online. Images (and I think PDFs too) less than 1mb in size even show a preview of the file automatically too.
Library items can be organised into folders to help organise them, and these folders can then be shared with your groups (who will have read-only access to them). As well as having groups for each class in my school, I also have a 'staff' group that only staff can access - I spent around four hours last weekend uploading PowerPoints and printable resources to share with this staff group so that they can access them at home (something which many have been requesting for a good few years now).
Lastly, I want to quickly point out a few things I've discovered about user profiles:
when pupil passwords are reset, it takes about a minute for changes to take effect and automatically makes any characters in them capital letters;
some children might change their last name to something a bit jokey and so need telling to change it back again so that everyone knows who they are;
profile pictures can be animated GIFs.
In just under a month, Edmodo has become firmly embedded in my school - everyone has taken to it so quickly and with so much enthusiasm that I've actually been amazed. We even held a meeting for parents earlier this week to tell them about what our vision is for using the site and how they can help their child to work on it.
(Created by S Haughton, M Kemp and clip art provided by B Evans)
Nearly every other day I've been getting an email or Tweet sent to me from a school asking me if I would recommend rolling out Edmodo and each time my response has be a definite 'yes'!
I'll end with a few comments from our children about why they love Edmodo so much:
"I don't like Edmodo, I love it!"
"It's better doing homework on computers than paper. I think if you do more homework on computers you can get more people to turn it in instead of maybe having some scruffy writing on paper."
"Edmodo is the best!"
"Because you can chat to each other and do assignments."
"I like Edmodo because you can comment on people's writing and share things with one another."
"I like Edmodo because you can talk to friends at home."
Edmodois probably most easily described as being a child-friendly version of Facebook designed specially for schools.
For the past few months I do admit to becoming a bit concerned about the number of pupils I was hearing about in school who are on Facebook - especially when I know that they will have broken its terms and conditions by lying and pretending that they are over 13 years old when registering. I do teach e-safety lessons fairly regularly but I always think that it's a fine line I have to draw between teaching them how to work with a site that they shouldn't be on in the first place (thus promoting it in a way) and teaching them good e-safety behaviours in general.
I originally signed up to Edmodo two years following @markw29's recommendation. At the time though, whilst what it offered was good, it was a service still in its infancy and it did have a few missing features that made what it offered a bit too basic I felt. Having been keeping tabs on their blog however, over the last month or so I began to notice that the team behind the site had introduced lots of new tools recently. This, coupled with a quick chat with @primarypete_ and @2sparkley, made me want to have another look at the site to see how it had improved since my last visit and to see if it could help me deal with my concerns regarding Facebook use by pupils.
Having done all my school jobs last Saturday, I signed into Edmodo and was pleasantly surprised with what I found - it basically now offered everything anybody could ever want from a school version of Facebook and therefore a fantastic safe online environment for children to use to develop their online behaviours before being 'exposed' to more famous, world-wide, 'adult' websites when they get older.
Here's a quick overview of how to get started on the site yourself:
1. Register as a teacher by going to www.edmodo.com and fill in the on-screen form.
2. Register your school address onto their system and set up a customised sub-domain. This sounds more complicated than what it actually is - all you have to do is choose a unique web address and fill the form in on that page. For example, I work at Parkfield Primary School so filled in the form at parkfield.edmodo.com
3. Set up groups for all the different classes in your school. As these have to be unique, I went for the easy-to-remember titles of 'ParkfieldY3', 'ParkfieldY4' etc.
The website is then extremely easy for children to register with themselves and use:
Each group has a unique code which (as a teacher) you can find out by hovering over the group's name and going to 'settings'.
Children sign up by going to your subdomain and filling in the simple form (remembering to enter their year group's code to associate them with their class). Their username needs to be unique but easy to remember - I tried to therefore encourage children to go for their first name followed by a two-digit number (e.g. 'john32' or 'clare86').
Once logged in, children can then only see their own year group's page - other children in other classes can't see this and no strangers can access this as they don't know the group's secret code which is required when signing up.
Messages can then be sent to be displayed on this page for everyone to see by just typing what's wanted in the message box at the top and then choosing to send to that's groups name. They appear instantly for all the other children to see and read.
Files can be uploaded or web links/embed codes can be easily copied/pasted in to attach to a message. Images open up in a nice preview window in the middle of the screen and little thumbnails are shown of websites to illustrate what they show.
Children can reply to each others' messages by clicking the 'reply' button. They can't send messages privately to each other - only to the whole group. This means that everybody in the group can see any conversations/discussions.
Children can change their profile picture (and password) by going to the settings menu at the top of the screen - they can either select an avatar from the collection or upload a picture from their computer.
During this past week I've managed to teach Years 4-6 how to access the site, plus a handful of keen Year 3 children who come to my weekly afterschool Internet club too. I made a rule in my head that I would only give out the group code to register with to children who I had taught how to use its features - I didn't want children using the website without knowing its full features. (I gave them all a little card to write down on what their class code was to take home - you can download it here.)
Edmodo is a private website - only children I've allowed and given the code to can join it. The messages appear instantly in the group's timeline and to me this isn't really a problem as no members of the public will be reading them (unlike comments on my school website which only appear publicly after they've been moderated and approved for viewing). I made sure that I emphasised to the children whom I introduced Edmodo to that they were aware that their usage would be monitored and that there were a range of possible sanctions in place which could be implemented if they misused/abused this privilege of being allowed to post instant messages:
I could reply to messages to give them feedback (e.g. 'Please use correct spellings.')
I could edit their message to correct any factual inaccuracies - having a teacher account I can edit anyone's message whereas the children can only edit their own.
I could delete their message if it was unsuitable - again I can do this to any message and the children can only delete their own.
To make sure that they were fully aware of my expectations of how they should use the website, I created a poster and made a quick redirect page on my own website which displays this for 10 seconds to the children before they are then taken to the login page. On this page I also put on links to:
As I wanted other members of staff at school to use Edmodo and be able to have the same management/editing tools available as me, I enabled them to join as 'co-teachers':
Each teacher needs to sign up by going to my school subdomain and filling in the form. They need to enter the school code as a security measure - this (after lots of hunting) I found was available when I logged into my subdomain administrator account and hovered over my school's name on the 'Manage' page (not my school's name shown on the timeline view).
Once registered, they then needed to 'join' the different year groups - I gave my deputy head the codes for everyone's groups but other teachers I would just give their own year group's code to, to avoid confusion.
Having done this, you (as each group's creator) then need to go to the list of members for each group (by hovering over its title and going to 'members') and change the teachers to 'co-teachers'.
It's worth point out that co-teachers have access to a variety of useful group admin tools too:
they can reset the group's code to stop further children from accessing it;
they can reset a child's password if it has been forgotten;
they can remove a child from a group (e.g. if they leave the school).
I've only been using Edmodo for one week yet in that time it has been unbelievably successful - I've had six parents personally thank me for finding it, I've had three children in Year 5 who've been using it to write poetry of their own choosing and have even had a bit of debate started after my deputy head put on a poll to find out what everyone's favourite subject is (currently tied between English and ICT)!
In these hard financial times, I'm very grateful to come across a website that offers so much to schools with absolutely no cost whatsoever - everything on Edmodo is completely free! (They also have a great technical support team who have so far responded in a matter of hours to any queries I've had.)
It's still early days at the moment using the website for me - I'm still trying to think up how to best exploit the uses of it to improve children's learning and I know I've still got features of it still to explore - notably the online 'library' (aka digital e-portfolio) I can set up and the online assignment/homework facility it provides - but I've not been so amazed by the capabilities of such a website for a very a long time.
Both my deputy head and head (who just happened to come into my lesson with the head of the LA's technical team at the exact same as I was introducing it to Year 5) seem extremely impressed with the work I've managed to do setting up Edmodo with the children and are looking forward to seeing how it can become embedded even more as a school digital communication tool in future.
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