Week 11 - Tools

Since I’m not currently a teacher and my goal is to instruct teachers on how to use technology in their classrooms, I found a great tool that I discovered last year while attending to a conference in technology called TNT.  This tool is called Edmodo, in my extensive web development experience I can tell that Edmodo is a very user friendly application that brings collaboration to another level. Edmodo is a web 2.0 technology that not only brings collaboration to the classroom but communication between teacher and students as well as teacher-parents. This is a very useful tool that I guess K-12 teacher can take advantage of.  This lesson plan is for professional Development and is target it to K-12 teacher to have better control of their students and assignments.  

Edmodo is free; I will cover the most basic functions of Emodo You can have as many groups or classes as you want, after you login, you can customize your profile by uploading your picture, type something about you. 

 

You can also share where do you teach…

 

On the left side of your edmodo page you can see your latest posts, your students, assignments by group or class…

You can easily create groups or classes and create your roster for your class. I like so much Edmodo because it’s Twitter is integrated with Edmodo, you can share a link with your students that they will have to have a code in order to get into that group that you just created.  When you go to Edmodo, it will ask you if you are a teacher or a student, if you are student you will have to enter the code given by your professor in order to register for that class. 

You can sign up as parent as well, which also the professor needs to provide the code for the parents, the great part about this is that as teacher you have control of your class and you can easily track your students and your student’s parents. You can send messages to the entire class, to individual students, to all parents or to a parent in specific. 

Another great functionality is that you can create sub-group. Let say that you have divided your class in 4 sub-groups, you can achieve this in edmodo. 

 You can always reset or lock the code for a class, for security purposes or if you have a limit in your class, for instance if your class roster is for 15 students, once all of your students have registered for your class you can lock your group so you don’t accept anymore registrations.

Another great tool about edmodo is that you can create folders for your class. You can upload files to a folder or you can share your folder with your class for your students to upload their assignments.

You have more than just posting assignments.  You can send emergency alerts, connections, feeds, polls and quizzes; again this can be done in a group or individual basis.

More features about edmodo, Assignments, you can specify the title, a small description, due date, you can attach a file, links or a document from you library.

Edmodo is an ALL-IN-ONE tool, you can manage and track your grades, assignments, classes everything with edmodo, I am not a teacher yet, but this is a tool that I would definitely use. Edmodo is a lifesaver for teachers. I can easily see many advantages.

The other tool I used is JING, is a tool to create screenshots and videos, is free and it allows you to store your content in the cloud.  The screenshoots I used for this and my past assignments, I used Jing, and the following videos as well. Please join me and watch the videos I created using JING. It even allows to create "playlists". You can watch my Edmodo playlist on an basic intro to Edmodo.

  Edmodo - Quick Intro