Educational Networking:
Towards the Twenty First Century Classroom

 

Communicating Online:
Trials, Tribulations & Triumphs

It could be argue that every feature of edmodo enables increased communication with our students!!

Being able to answer questions, reinforce that says lesson, mention something that was forgotten or cut off by the bell, this is a welcome solution to a classroom issue that we all struggle with from time to time.

One of the issues that I found when working my students via edmodo was making sure that communication was always related to class content...  One day I had the students on individual laptops, working on an online inquiry assignment that included a brief lecture.  When I went online later that day I found that the students had been having a conversation via edmodo while I was lecturing.  While the conversation mentioned the lecture once, it was primarily off task. 
I found myself unsure of the proper repercussions for this, and decided to have a conversation with the students about it.  I was not surprised that they also agreed the conversation was off topic, and not making use of edmodo's intended purposes.
 

Getting students to logon to edmodo and join the group was also an obstacle to the communication functions of edmodo.  While I was able to solve this problem by having them all logon using class time, it was impossible to use edmodo to communicate with students who never logged on outside of class. 

I felt that edmodo really triumphed when students who seemed completely disengaged during class would subnit the edmodo assignment - and do a great job!  (Please check out the course content page for more details on what resources I posted online.) 
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Edmodo gives ALL students an opportunity to be heard!

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