EDMODO.COM Interactive Facebook for Schools Rachel Shankles cell

Free Private Facebook-type platform for schools and colleges You can set up your own school domain within your district---ours is Many advantages for teachers, students and parents Great for announcements, clubs, and subgroups within your school Web-based so not taking up room on your server EDMODO.COM

Elements of Edmodo Badges Photos/profiles Apps Schooltube Communities Teacher connections Groups

For Teachers Each teacher sets up a class and receives an alphanumeric number to give to those who need to sign up to get feeds from the teacher Some teachers teach the same subject all day and do one code for like Alg II Others set up a different code for each period Sometimes teachers who teach the same subject just set up one code Can be used to receive assignments that can be graded online for paperless classrooms MP4 video of classes can be uploaded easily as help for reviews or absent students

Advantages for Teachers Push out homework assignments Push out alerts of upcoming projects or tests Set up surveys or short polls/quizes Push out encouragements Communicate privately through the messaging with students or any of your “contacts” Join Edmodo groups on your subject matter and collaborate with educators in other places Teachers can post notes, alerts, documents on their timeline or in their library files Our teachers video the first lesson of the day and post to Edmodo the video; especially good for math classes so the kids can review and review while doing homework

Students  Can see their assignments on phones or at home at night to review or do the work  Keep up with assignments from all teachers in one place  Receive notices of club meetings or school events/announcements posted by a variety of faculty members  Ask questions of the teacher

Advantages for Students The Facebook-like interface allows them to ‘join’ a group for every one of their classes and any of their clubs Students can get to any file a teacher has posted in their ‘library’ and print any assignments Available 24/7 Stores class info for makeup work when students are absent Students can upload ppts or other projects to the teacher through Edmodo—from school or home

Parents There is a special way for parents to sign up to oversee what the teacher and student are doing on Edmodo The parent can communicate with the teacher The parent can see the assignments and help the child stay on track with course work

Disadvantages Internet is required Students must sign up for an account and remember a user name and pw because the school does not have it; losing this info means they have to create a whole new acct So try to be on one page and have all students use a certain formula for user name and pw maybe just like they use for gradebook---we use ID number and birthdate MMDDYY for gradebook or firstinitiallastname as user and Schoolnameyear as pw Remember that some people will always complain. The o and 0 and the L and 1 look alike so warn teachers when setting up codes to hit ‘reset number’ till they get one without these two items for more success

Helpful Hints To remember the codes for all classrooms we set up a Google doc where teachers posted all their codes---access by faculty only We also required all teachers to post the Edmodo code for the class as the FIRST grade in the gradebook this year. Parents and students could access that easily but would have to look at all their teacher’s gradebooks to get codes Parents found it hard to sign up with info coming home from students so we hosted parent nights at least twice to help parents sign up for Edmodo with our help in our labs Parents are directed to the library if they missed those meeting and want to sign up later in the year. Some teachers felt changed in getting their classes set up and loading their materials in to the library after using TeacherWeb for so long