Blackboard Learn by Anthology vs. Edmodo (discontinued) vs. Google Classroom

A school with a well-established technology imprint with their students (for example, ours is a BYOB school where every student has their own laptop and must bring it to school every day and where over 99% of our families have reliable broadband at home) is a reasonable scenario for using The arrogance and intransigence of the sales force is quite disconcerting… They are no longer the only game in town and don't yet realize it. Less well-off schools/families may find it a challenge if students must be on campus or at a public library in order to use the technology. Obviously, during the pandemic, this became problematic for some districts.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Google Classroom allows teachers to post for daily lessons and assignments. It also allows teachers to be able to communicate with students easily outside of class. Students are able to stay connected and know where to find all information and resources easily in a streamlined manner for all of their classes.

Incentivized

• Blackboard Learn makes submitting assignments electronically simple and provides a variety of built-in Web-based tools like e-portfolios, wikis, and blogs that our students use to create their own content.
• Blackboard Learn is intuitive and easy to navigate from a students perspective
• Blackboard Learn has many integrations available for connecting this LMS to other tools we use at our institution.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Student-teacher communication - I love using Classroom for this because my students can always go back and check what was on Classroom by looking through the stream. This way they don't have to go dig through emails to find what they're looking for.
• Posting to multiple classes - I can post the same announcement or assignment to multiple classes at once without having to repeat the process or send separate emails.
• Streamlining grading - when students turn work in on Classroom, it all goes to one place and then when I'm grading I can open their documents directly from Classroom or my Drive folder. This way, I'm not looking through emails and Google Doc shared files for their assignment.

Incentivized

• Blackboard Learn has some limitations when it comes to submissions
• It is not that user friendly, I had to spend some time to get a hang of it in the beginning
• I have been struggling a bit with deletion of manually added courses

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The content management of the Classroom is not that good. The sub-section for notes, syllabus, or discussion is missing.
• It doesn't have parental control feature.
• It converts the excel output into a normal file. All the formulas and pivots got changed into plain text.

There are several aspects of Desire2Learn that outweigh the benefits of using Blackboard. I find that the Desire2Learn system is a bit more user friendly and looks more up-to-date. However, the decision to renew systems is not up to me because the entire University uses the same system. Regardless, I think I would choose Desire2Learn over Blackboard because of its improved user interface.

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.

Testing is particularly important in online learning, and Google Classroom falls far short of other learning management systems in this regard. Security is also a concern: while account control is reasonable for the account used with Google Classroom, the person controlling a particular account is often able to, for example, forward or download proprietary materials.

It is very usable for both faculty and students. The interface is pretty intuitive and most students can use it without a lot of additional training. Faculty do need some training to effectively use the interface, but they usually get it pretty quickly. We have had to create some additional programming to give faculty a way to delve deeper into the content.

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.

Simple design and seamless integration with Google tools and drive, but missing some key features. However, since it is limited in overall functions and ability to truly personalize / customize, it is quite user friendly and easy to set up and get going, other than sending out the code to your course or dropping students in via their gmail account. Users of Google Forms and sites will find the layout similar in design.

Incentivized

We have had very little trouble in accessing Google Classroom. Our issues, if any, have risen from our server and not the Google servers.

Incentivized

My Blackboard support comes from the university I work with. They are responsive--eventually... but it takes them sometimes a week to respond to a reported issue. For example, I reported 2 issues last week and one was resolved and I was contacted about one still open option today. That is too long for a tech issue. I have not contacted any support offered directly by Blackboard, which may be a completely different experience altogether.

Incentivized

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.

Since this platform is provided by Google, the technical support is better than any others, and we are not required to bother about the space constraints for adding the contents. If we have a good uninterrupted internet facility we can access Google Classroom without any delay or lag. They have app support in both Android and iPhone.

Blackboard's Managed Hosting was top-notch in getting us up and running quickly.

Incentivized

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

It was relatively easy to implement due to the simplicity of the platform. Even our more technology challenged teachers found it easy to get started with Google Classroom.

Incentivized

Coursera offers a variety of modules in which a team is able to work on then, but [Blackboard Learn] offers more options to understand how are the team members developing and which tasks have offered a harder challenger for them. [Blackboard Learn] also offers a variety of reports that can be generate by a team lead.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I haven't tested or evaluated another digital classroom website or application. I feel like Google Classroom is convenient for many reasons such as compatibility to Google docs, slides, etc. I also love the ability to link to YouTube and other sites. I don't know if there would be a site that is easier to maneuver.

Incentivized

It is very easy to push out this program across our buildings. Teachers are able to use it without much trouble.

Incentivized

• At one of the institutions that I worked for, the ROI was excellent for the number of users we were serving; however, I could not speak to other instances as I was not aware of the overall cost of the contract.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Students are able to continue learning in a remote environment
• Parents have a single, consistent organization structure to make it easy to track assignments and progress for multiple children
• Much better solution than the quickly assembled Zoom-and-gloom of the previous spring when school abruptly went remote with no planning

Incentivized