A Cloud Guru (ACG) was a cloud learning resource that offered access to updated courses, labs, and learning paths. In 2021 the company was acquired by Pluralsight, and its training is no longer available.
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Edmodo (discontinued)
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Edmodo was a blended learning and distance learning platform for schools and districts, educators, and learners, providing tools for classroom instruction, professional collaboration, communication, and community building. The platform has been discontinued since 2022.
If your organization is technical-based and offers its employees different online courses to enhance their knowledge, then A Cloud Guru will be perfect for you. There are multiple courses available from different cloud platforms. The platform is easy to use and navigate and does not require much knowledge. Even if you do not have basic technical knowledge, the courses available in A Cloud Guru are designed in such a manner that a non-technical person will understand the concept easily.
Well, Edmodo is the best e-learning platform. Even you do not have to meet your audience face to face. And there are tons of free courses in different subjects. Now everyone can join them easily and increase their general knowledge or in specific subjects. I am individually using Edmodo for creating groups for my students and our staff members. There are plenty of tools for doing different kinds of work. If you are working with pupils, then you can add their parents to the group and they can only view their child's grades. You can create assignments for your members and you can grade them using Edmodo.
Edmodo syncs with my Google Drive, making the sharing of assignments, handouts, pictures, and videos incredibly easy. Because I can store often-used materials in my Edmodo library, I can find them easily for the next time I am working on that unit.
The quizzes are easy to set up and they can be used again, so if I need to do a check for understanding on a particular topic in multiple classrooms, or use the same baseline data collection quiz for more than one semester, I need only create the quiz once.
The calendar feature for Edmodo allows me to plan my lessons days, even weeks ahead. I can keep assignments hidden until the day I plan to teach them, and if I need extra time for a lesson within a unit, adjusting the due dates is a simple drag-and-drop operation.
Although Edmodo has a nice online assessment feature, it lacks in critical areas. It is difficult to attach diagrams or charts to questions. This can be done, but they are displayed in a module which pops up in front of the question. This thus hides the questions when looking at the diagram, picture, etc.
Questions can be randomized in Edmodo when students take an assessment, which is a nice feature. Answer choices, however, cannot be randomized.
Edmodo could use a much better WYSIWYG editor. It can be difficult to incorporate equations or subscript for instance.
The analytical data offered in assessments is decent, but it would be good if the following was added: it would be good to see which answers where most commonly missed by students; it would be good if more class data was given, such as average, median, low scores.
Other LMS platforms do a much nicer job of incorporating these feature directly into the question.
You are unable to add attachments to Calendar postings. This would be a very useful feature.
Updates can get lost after a while, and are difficult to search for. Once you have a large numbers of postings, finding older postings, which very well could be assignments or assessments, can be tedious for both students and parents. Even with using the built in filter feature, this is certainly an area I could see improvement being made.
Although Edmodo has a nice Folder feature to store your materials as a teacher, it is painstaking to use once you have a large number of items in a folder. The drop and drag feature is slow, and doesn't always stick. There is no subfolder feature as well. So, although you can organize materials, other LMS platforms make it much easier to organize and share you materials with students, parents, and other colleagues.
Edmodo is a LEARNING tool. Not "one more thing" I have to use or integrate. It was my one stop shop for everything for my classes. More importantly, I was able to watch my students grow. My students who were timid, and quiet, became my discussion leaders. Students who didn't do their homework, never missed an assignment once I started doing "e-tickets" and discussion groups. Everyone felt they had a voice, which made our classroom community that much stronger.
When I was given 100 studnets it was no problem. When I was given another 60 it was still no problem. I didn't really have much more work to do. I definately didn't have to make copies or look for old assignments for students who joined a school later than traditional one's. When students missed or were sent home, they could still be part of the learning community.
The support team of A Cloud Guru is quite quick. There are scenarios where A Cloud Guru was not working in my organization. We reached out to their support team and they quickly resolved the issue. Also, if any individual is facing issues accessing A Cloud Guru, their support team is quick to resolve the issue.
Support through Edmodo is excellent. The communities are a really great way to get fast help because they are actively monitored, and responses are posted by other community members and the support staff. Users can also email Edmodo with suggestions, and in my experience, an Edmodo support person will respond with additional information or, at the very least, with an acknowledgement of the suggestion.
Plan a little extra time to let them play with the platform with fun assignments. This made them comfortable submitting work, finding items, communicating with me or each other
The main differentiator was the contents as we were interested in a cloud platform other similar platforms did not have the below: it is very good to establish cloud learning development plans and then track them and manage them for the team. The platform supports learning tracks, exams, and sandboxes with all major cloud providers guarantees that you don't get an accidental charge as a result of [the] testing and exploring the cloud
I actually utilize Google Classroom over Edmodo in most of my school functions. I still use Edmodo as a coach and club adviser but prefer Google Classroom as a classroom teacher. Google Classroom offers everything that Edmodo does but seems to be more efficient, particularly for our school as our district has paid for Google apps and each student has their own Gmail account. Additionally, Google Classroom allows students to access Google Docs and edit in real time where Edmodo has some limitations in that regard. Finally, students generally have stated that they prefer Google Classroom as the smartphone application is easier and more dynamic.
Definitely better customer service! Once the parents figured out the tool and students were proficient with it. It was an excellent way to communicate student's strengths and weaknesses in their learning.
Increased employee efficiency. Especially since teachers can share assignments easily too. And, as I've referred to many times, the grading feature is a huge time saver!
A negative impact is we have had some cyberbulling. But, used the blocking features and handled it with face-to-face interaction with the students in question and their families.
