Teach42

Jeff O’Hara, known to many as Zemote on Twitter, invited me to take Edmodo for a spin before he opens it up to beta testers. I’ve been talking about it with him for well over a year, so I’ve been salivating over this for quite a while.

If you haven’t seen the basic layout of it, this should help you get an idea of what it looks like.

The main timeline is very similar to what you see in Twitter, just with a few more controls. You control how many appear on the page, you can do a basic search, and you can filter the central feed down to specific categories, like assignments or events. Individual posts display the icon of the person who posted it, and are highlighted by a colored border, identifying which class, group or activity the post is targeted to. For example, in the example above, all Science Club posts are grey, making it really easy to pick them out of the primary feed. One other key difference between it and Twitter is that replies are actually threaded, allowing them to stick together to form conversations. If you’ve used Twitter for very long, you know how much of a challenge it can be following back a conversation of replies and @ messages. Threaded responses make much more sense for a school environment.

Speaking of classes, activities and groups, the inclusion of them makes it rather easy for teachers to blast info out just to the students who need it. You can always click on any of those links to filter things down to just that category. Of course, if something really important comes along, you can always click “Locker” and it will stash the post in your locker (think of it like ‘favorites’ but with more of a purpose). Even your locker can start to get messy though, so Edmodo allows you to tag your posts that are saved in there and provides a drop down box to filter out your locker by tags you’ve created.

The other major difference between this and Twitter is the diversity of what you can share. You aren’t limited to 140 characters, but the size of the bubble really encourages you to keep things brief. However, you can share text, links, and files. You can even embed things into the text area, which opens up an entirely new world of possibilities (see the screencast demo for an example of this). If you’re a teacher, you can also post alerts, assignments and events, which each have their own dedicated boxes along the right hand side.

Events allow you to enter in a date, so the widget along the right can display what events are coming up soon. Assignments also allow you to enter in a date, giving you the same functionality, but they also allow you to add files directly to that posting. Alerts will make you nostalgic for Twitter itself, since they have a limit of 140 characters. I’m guessing that if it doesn’t provide the option to send alerts via SMS, that’ll be coming in a future release.

There’s no question that educators love Twitter. And while many have tried to figure out where it fits into education, so far the general consensus is that it doesn’t really make sense in the classroom. Not the way it is right now at least. Edmodo on the other hand is designed with the school environment in mind. It’s built from the ground up to provide teachers with a communication platform that’s as simple as Twitter, but shaped to support the classroom experience. While there are still some bugs to be worked out before it goes prime time, trust me when I say you want to be on the list for a beta invite. There are so few Web 2.0 sites that are designed specifically with education in mind, I get the feeling that this one is really going to lead the way.

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