A great way to hybridize your classroom
September 25, 2015
A great way to hybridize your classroom
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Edmodo
Many teachers in our organization use Edmodo in the classroom, but we also have schools and committees that are using Edmodo for their professional learning communities. We have found Edmodo useful in a large school district like ours, as it allows many of our teachers who are alone in their buildings, like Librarians, Art and Music teachers, and PE teachers, to asynchronously communicate with each other about best practices, share lesson plans, and have a stronger sense of team.
- 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.
- One of the features that my students and I were upset to lose was the Tagging option for assignments. When I used the Tags to mark a Unit, students who had missed a significant amount of school could search for the appropriate tag (say, Unit 2 Persuasive) to find the assignments and materials easily. Having to scroll down through the news feed was time-consuming and cumbersome, and students were unable to locate lecture notes by clicking on the calendar, so without the tags, locating missed assignments was frustrating.
- I don't mind making my own badges, but I wish there were an easy-to-find location where I could find badges created by other teachers so I could borrow them for my own classes.
- Edmodo made grading easier and less cumbersome for me; I could take home my laptop instead of a bag full of papers.
- Edmodo made communicating with my students easier; I could send reminders and notifications to them when they were not in my classroom.
- Edmodo made communicating with parents easier and more meaningful; I could hold Parent-Teacher conversations over the phone while we both looked at the student's data online simultaneously.
I have taught hybrid classrooms using WebCT, Blackboard, and D2L. I have used Schoology in the past for a brief time. Edmodo is a good LMS because students like its Facebook style; I like it because I feel it is a K-12 appropriate means of getting secondary students used to the format and expectations of a hybrid course, because it is more user-friendly and simple.