Assessment Task ONE: EDUC 1715

Digital Artefact: Edmodo

www.edmodo.com

By Nathan Lee & Nick Jorgensen

What is Edmodo?

Edmodo is a social networking website for the use of teachers, students and parents. Users can check grades, assignments, and write posts to classmates, teachers, and parents. Teachers can also post grades and assign homework to students. Students can then submit the homework and view their grade as well as any comments the teacher may have posted about their assignment. 

Edmodo uses an interface that is similar to the popular social networking site “facebook” which positively engages students to use this artefact as most students already are familiar with how to use facebook and can log into edmodo and almost instantly begin to use it in a productive manner whether they are posting homework or reading notes that the teacher has left for them.

The positives of edmodo are the easy to use interface that can be taught quickly by the teacher to the students and parents, also this artefact encourages the sharing of work between students and teachers as things can be posted back and forth between the two parties. This is an exciting and new system to be available to students now as before they would only be able to get feedback on work at school where using edmodo the students can get feedback after school hours and in some cases even during school holidays to further develop students skills.

Edmodo is relevant to the curriculum as it is a good way students can share work that they have found useful to other students and it also gives the teachers are good way to assess how the students are travelling in a given subject as they can view progress made by a student through the work that they submit, edmodo can be used effectively to see the consistency of the students work that they are submitting.

New learning oppurtunities are presented by the use of edmodo as it gives students an equal chance to get available resources and help from the teacher even when they are not at school as they can access edmodo from there personal computers at home and even some smart phones can support an edmodo application which once again appeals to many students.

In modern day classrooms students level of concentration is much lower than that of previous generations. Interactive and computer based learning has shown to increase a students ability to concentrate, if restricted from access to other sites than the task at hand. Edmodo is a program which enables students to grasp the belief that they are being given freedom to a social network which at the same time primarily focuses on student learning.

Although there are limitations in this artefact and the most obvious one would be that edmodo is rendered useless to students without access to internet which may seem uncommon but for students living in rural areas this can be a reality. Another limitation is that it needs cooperation from students and parents to function to its full potential therefore in some cases edmodo can not be used correctly.

Pedagogy can easily be implemented into an edmodo based lesson. The teacher could post pieces of work on their own profile and instruct the students to log on and view the task at hand. The positives to this process include; saving printing off a sheet of paper for each child. It also allows the students to interact between each other and share ideas and their own opinions. The use of edmodo gives the teacher total control over the lesson and stops students from sidetracking.

Edomodo’s familiar web layout is no accident, it has been made very similar to popular social networking site facebook to appeal to the students as most are already familiar with the layout and design of this social networking website.

Edmodo allows the same process of posting updates, pictures, and videos the same as Facebook does. However the difference being edmodo only allows education based topics, generally supervised by the teacher to avoid students from going off on a tangent of their own.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-KBwriCO-Q Edmodo at a Glance

This youtube video gives a 1 minute glance at the style and some of edmodos important features that make it and a brief overview on how it is used.

After watching the tutorial video and brief overview on edmodo it is easy to see how an educational cross social networking site can be extremely beneficial to not only students but also teachers and parents as a way of tracking the students progress with assigned classwork and tasks.