Introducing Edmodo...

I introduced Edmodo to my students today. It went really well overall. I am using the website www.edmodo.com to post questions for my students to discuss about their reading, as well as quizzes related to class material and language arts benchmarks, and also for homework and small group assignments. I want my students to be able to use our edmodo page to collaborate with each other and build ideas, leading towards greater understanding of our reading. Today was a simple introduction where my students signed up for the website, joined the class page, and completed three simple tasks. The first task was a word of the day prompt using the word "persist" and students had to use it in a sentence and explain why it is important to persist in language arts class. Secondly, my students read a brief article about the 2013 Miss America pageant in which an Indian woman won the pageant, leading to some public controversy. Students had to identify her point of view on the controversy behind her win. Lastly, students took a 2 question quiz to briefly test their understanding of author's purpose and text structure. These sum up our major benchmarks we have covered so far this quarter. It was very easy for the students to sign up and comment to answer the questions.

One mini-lesson that I wish I would have given them beforehand would be about the difference between academic and friend speech. More specifically, the difference between formal and informal language. At first my students wanted to use the Edmodo site like their own Facebook page and respond to things other people were saying or shout out to them, etc, without answering the question asked. For the rest of my classes, I explicitly told them to only answer the question and not respond to the posts of others. I think this is an important step in teaching students responsibility using the internet for classroom learning because you have to scaffold them up towards responding responsibly to others. So, firstly, if students can post their own response to the questions asked using appropriate academic language then they can begin to master the art of responding to others' ideas in the forum. I only had 2 incidents of students posting inappropriate slang - nothing awful or hurtful - just slang that is not necessary in school. Students who did not follow instructions were asked to immediately sign off and we discussed what appropriate use of the forum looks like.

At the end of our activity, I asked my students to rate how much they believed that using Edmodo in class will help them become more interested and engaged in reading. Results will be posted soon once I type them into Excell and average them out.