Edmodo Possibilities

I'm trying to go to things in my placement that will help with my professional development and also to experience more of the "teacher culture" of my school outside of class time. This week I went to a technology class Wednesday after school and on Friday I met with my grade level teachers for our Professional Learning Community meeting. The tech class was focused around Edmodo. First, I have to say, that a tech class after a very long Wednesday was a little rough. One of the teachers was leading it, and it was a good way for teachers to get tech hours without having to leave the school or plan a special day to do it- they could just stay after school until 5 (which, most of them do anyway) and spend time learning this new technology.

Edmodo is actually AMAZING. If I could sum it up for you all, it's almost like an education focused Facebook with much more security. Edmodo is capable of much more than I was able to learn about in our one tech class, but I will be blogging about what I learned from that day. The person who was teaching us this tool teaches 5th grade. He uses it as a part of his teaching and created a group space where all of his students can access (and only them). It is essentially a closed Facebook-type site where students can post notes to the whole class, access assignments, and ask for clarification on assignments. There is a parent account option as well, and he has all of his students parents/guardians on Edmodo, and he uses it to send out weekly newsletters. It was really exciting to see the potential here for using it in the classroom. I actually haven't completely ruled out Edmodo for kindergartners either- maybe I would just use it to keep in contact with students families? I think there is definitely potential there! 

One thing I immediately thought of when I heard that it was a "Facebook-type" site, albeit a closed, safe community, was bullying. This teacher, who has been using Edmodo for about 2 years, said a few things about that. One was that he has his group set so that each post to the wall of the group sends him a text to his phone, so he monitors it frequently. A key thing for him was making sure that students realize that he 1) reads everything that they post, and that 2) they can all read everything that everyone posts. It turns out that after they recognize those two things that he doesn't actually need to do a whole lot of monitoring. And if someone abuses the classroom rules for posting, he can set them to "read only". I loved that! They are still a part of the learning community and can access the information, but they are in a posting time out. When I was listening to teachers talking about this all I could think about was how important something like this would be for my students. I was part of the generation who figured out Facebook in high school, and I don't think I was fully aware until later on that everything that I post might be up there for a long, long time. Students don't always realize that the stuff we post online is up there for good! How valuable might something like Edmodo be for students to get a safe version of a Facebook-esque site before the real thing?