edmodo
Description
Edmodo is an educational platform for the first 12 years of schooling (kindergarten – high school) with scalable features that allows teachers to communicate and collaborate with other educators and students to create a more interactive teaching environment (can be best thought as a digital classroom). Access is invitation only by teachers and can be used both within and outside the framework of the classroom. The tool is innovative insofar as it promotes teacher to teacher training and professional development, it facilitates instant communication with students, other educators and parents on due dates, announcements, resources, events etc. The users need to create a new account that is free. The platform can be used to go paperless with its virtually unlimited cloud storage and can be used for an expanding toolkit of functions. Edmodo also provides the possibility to overview interactions and identify potential issues by extracting relevant statistics or create/integrate educational resources that can then be sold through the website.
Key functionality
- Compatibility: Accessible through computers & mobile devices.
- Multi-lingual: English, Croatian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Greek, French, Italian, Turkish, Dutch, Chinese, Swedish.
- Connectivity: Edmodo can work with both Google Apps and Microsoft office tools as well as most other educational and other resources (blogs, chats, etc.).
- Insights: The tool, just like Facebook page manager, provides statistics for interactions and a general overview on the number of notes, replies, assignment and quizzes send over a period.
- Adaptability: Ability to integrate personalized data and other educational resources like apps, games.
- Wholesale working environment for educators: Resources created can be uploaded, shared or even sold within this platform.
- Professional Development: Edmodo allows teachers to communicate with other teachers or sell their product on site.
- Online child Security: Site abides to the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act that requires parent consent personal identifiable information about children below the age of 13.
- Protected Intellectual Property: Edmodo doesn’t allow free knowledge sharing in its side. All content needs to be licensed in order to be usable g. sharing lesson plans does not give a viewer license to print and use that material without permission.
Who uses the tool
Pedagogical purposes:
Facilitate continuous wholesale interactions with students, integrating educational tools, assignments, forum, and feedback
Platforms
Privacy and user data
The app collects the following types of information from all users:
- Subscription is required
- Contact list on mobile device
- Email account
- Browser – IP address
- Edmodo Cookie information
- Requested pages
- Activity details
- Number / Frequency of visitors
- Type of mobile device
- Name / Version of operating system
- Name / Version of application
- Type of user (teacher/parent/students)
- Numerical mobile device user ID
- Schools
- Any connected 3rd part apps may request other informations
The app uses this information to:
- For verification purposes
- For statistical purposes
Using the tool for PROMOVET
Advantages
- Edmodo feature that allows multiple educators collaboration on one student Putting reminders, assignments
- Educators can integrate other educational resources as it is very flexible
- Educators can sell their innovative approach to students
Disadvantages
- Adult educators might find the feature of collaborating with parents obsolete
- Its more geared towards formal education rather than vocational training
