Pedagogical Innovator

Hi dear team Jonassen,

Thank you Nikhil for leading this week’s discussion on learning resources and technologies. The web 2.0 tool I have chosen is Edmodo. Edmodo provides teachers and students a secure place to connect and collaborate, share content and educational applications, and access homework, grades, class discussions and notifications. The goal is to help educators harness the power of social media to customize the classroom for each and every learner. 

 

The Edmodo network enables teachers to share content, distribute quizzes, assignments, and manage communication with students, colleagues, and parents. Edmodo is very teacher-centric in their design and philosophy: students and parents can only join Edmodo if invited to do so by a teacher. Teachers and students spend large amounts of time on the platform, both in and out of the classroom. Edmodo is free to use, but it also offers premium services.

Edmodo was founded by Nick Borg, Jeff O'Hara, and Crystal Hutter in 2008. As of July 2019 Edmodo claimed to have over 100M users worldwide. About half of these users were in the US, with the rest being in 180 countries around the world. Significant concentrations exist in Singapore, Indonesia, Uruguay and Italy. About 10% of these users were teachers, an illustration of how popular Edmodo is in classrooms.
The link for this tool is:
https://new.edmodo.com/?go2url=%2Fhome

Edmodo is a free learning management tool that merges classroom content, safe communication, and assessment with students' social media savvy. Students and parents can get quick answers to questions as well as stay current on class assignments and happenings via the student planner and discussion threads. It allows to post a warm-up question, or take a quick poll to get student input on the day's topic or to quickly assess understanding. It also helps save time by using teacher-created assessments, and let Edmodo do some or all of the grading.
Moreover, it enables to go paperless by collecting, grading, and returning student essays digitally, perhaps using an outside rubric tool for even more efficiency. 

 

Edmodo helps students become more organized by using the teacher and student planner feature to manage assignments and deadlines using Edmodo's blackboard-like platform. Adding on, this tool helps to monitor student progress and personalize learning using the Snapshot feature, and use apps and badges to support student learning and increase engagement. Edmodo provides not only teaching and learning but an experience outside the classroom. It also provides limitless add-ins specially Microsoft. Also, it provide teachers a platform to grow and to interact with the other teachers. I think all educators should be familiar with Edmodo and use it in their classes.

Edmodo has integrated Google Drive into their system for easy turn in or sharing of student work. Edmodo allows students to help each other outside of the classroom by replying to others posts 24/7. Edmodo provides a safe and secure platform for students to develop online etiquette according to teacher direction. Once the classroom has been set up, teachers can either pose questions to the students or take a poll of popular questions that would stimulate conversation. The teacher can also post a quiz on the site so students can post their answers to the quiz.

Below is the video to help guide through the use of Edmodo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8l5SAtXBBs

Looking forward for your views.

References
Dieberger, A. (1999) Social connotations of space in the Design for Virtual Communities and Social Navigation. In Munro, A., Höök K. & Benyon D. (Eds), Social Navigation of Information Space, pp. 35-54. Springer: London

Dillenbourg, P., Jermann, P., Buiu C., Traum , D. & Schneider D. (1997) The design of MOO agents: Implications from an empirical CSCW study. Proceedings, 198th World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, Kobbe, Japan.


Kind Regards
Arishnil Bali