Amazon Web Services offers the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) which provides pub/sub messaging and push notifications to iOS and Android devices. It is meant to operate in a microservices architecture and which can support event-driven contingencies and support the decoupling of applications.
$0.01
per 1 million
Edmodo (discontinued)
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
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.
$2,500
per month
Unique Learning System
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Unique Learning System (ULS) is a special education solution that supports students with disabilities from Pre-K through transition. It provides differentiated, standards-aligned lessons in ELA, math, science, social studies, and life skills with built-in assessments, progress tracking, and automated differentiation.
The Amazon SNS service is well suited to support event notifications, monitoring applications, workflow systems, time-sensitive information updates, and mobile applications that generates or consumes notifications. It can be used to relay time-critical events to mobile applications and devices. It provides significant advantages to developers who build mobile applications that rely on real-time events. It is not well suited for hybrid cross platform mobile application frameworks at this juncture. An optimal version to meet the needs of a cross platform mobile developer is needed as generally the frameworks are not meant to manage real-time events. It is also not suited for cases where the queue management needs improvement or requires special workflows/tooling.
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.
I have actually recommended it to another teacher in a different district for her autism program since she could level and pace it easily and also easily collect IEP data without stressing out her students with extra work. Unique Learning System is also a good program for our autism program because it is consistent with all core subjects, making is very routine based.
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.
Data tracking and progress reports - Unique Learning System's Polaris feature is a user-friendly, simple way to track and monitor progress towards learners IEP goals. When creating a roadmap that follows a learner's IEP, you input data such as learning profiles and benchmark assessments and rubrics that then produce goal suggestions. You can craft your own goal, use a suggested goal, or choose a goal from the goal library. It gives you a great idea of what goals to target based on learner needs and progress. Entering data is super easy, just a date and a data point, and a graph generates for you. From there, it will show the data trend and flag it for you when it's at risk. It is also easy to add an intervention. Quarterly, I use the progress report feature to generate a report that provides me with the graphs that I use to put into IEP writer.
Curriculum pacing - My school utilizes Unique Learning System for our daily instruction. Unique Learning System provides pacing guides with what to teach and when. Everything is standards aligned and all of the lesson plans have ways that you can differentiate already built into the plans as well as an easy to use, structured/routine based set up that makes daily lessons predictable for learners to increase engagement.
N2Y - My learners love News To You! This provides children with access to informational text. We use it as a "fun Friday" read every week. We read the article in class, watch videos, answer questions, and typically do an activity to go along with it. The kids look forward to it every week, and also enjoy the Joey's Locker games that go along with the articles. They have a new feature to be able to assign activities that go along with the article which is really nice because I assign them as supplemental activities to go along with what we are learning about in class!
At times you receive access denied errors which are annoying.
Rarely do you receive internal failure errors where you can't access the information. It is rare but it does happen.
You are required to add an MWS Authentication Token every so often. I wish it would pull that information automatically for you so you don't have to go searching for it.
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.
Unique Learning System's materials in the science and social studies areas aren't "fluffy" as other areas, but they are continuously adding materials
The layout of the website isn't the most user friendly, but most teachers are able to navigate easily after an initial training
The administrator side of things isn't super straightforward, reports can be confusing to find/run, but the one on one meetings always provide clarity.
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.
I appreciate all the various resources that Unique Learning System has to offer. However, due to my limited interaction with other resources similar to Unique Learning System I do not know enough to compare it against other programs. I also am not a person in charge of renewing Unique Learning System for my organization.
It is useful for applications developed using event driven architecture. It helps in tracking and logging the events in a very timely and efficient manner. The dashboards are a little difficult to implement. But overall it is very easy to integrate with other AWS services like Lambda, API GW, S3 and DynamoDB. The permissions to access should be resolved before using it.
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.
There is a lot of content in Unique Learning System. It can sometimes be time consuming to navigate through everything. I appreciate the depth and breadth of the resources, but it can also be tough to use when I need a worksheet or packet for my students. The use of Unique Learning System on the computer is great, but my students seem to learn best when they have a pen and paper in front of them.
Amazon Simple Notification Sevices (SNS) support depends on your usage pattern and definitely on your support plan as an enterprise with AWS. Before reaching out to support you should read their documentation, as they have mentioned almost all the common issues and their solutions there. However, for specific issues, they generally respond in 1-2 business days.
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
Amazon’s SNS is incredibly easy to set up compared to the more powerful, but complex, Kafka flavours.
SNS’s core advantages are –
· no setup/no maintenance
· either a queue (SQS) or a topic (SNS)
· various limitations (on size, how long a message lives, etc)
· limited throughput: you can do batch and concurrent requests, but still achieving high throughputs would be expensive
· SNS has notifications for email, SMS, SQS, HTTP built-in.
· no "message stream" concept Overall, it would be the best choice to get into the concepts of Pub/Sub concepts as although it has limitations it can provide significant capabilities and solutions
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.
We viewed Encore by TeachTown. The product seemed to be a notch above Unique Learning System and included workbooks and other books but was very expensive. The downfalls of Encore was that it did not include the Profile Assessments like Unique Learning System and also the monthly checkpoints which are very valuable.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) saved us a lot of extra coding time by providing straightforward functionality we needed in our ad campaign automation tool.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) allows us to maintain a consistent, serverless model within our applications.
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.
Ease of planning is #1. I am able to plan an entire lesson or a week's worth of lessons during my 30-minute planning time.
Data that is collected for IEPs is so valuable and reports are parent-friendly.
Students are able to work on the alternative path toward a diploma because this curriculm is covering all of the standards they need to see in order to earn their diploma.
