The big thing I did as summer work for the Tech course was remotely attend Edmodocon. The annual Edmodo conference. For those of you that don't remember, my project revolves around using Edmodo (to over-generalize, an educational "Facebook") in my classroom to facilitate class discussions and check-in with student learning.
The conference was kind of intense. A solid eight hours of presentations over the course of the day (I had to step away from the screen after about six). There were some really cool projects. One of my favorites was Pernille Ripp's talk about The Global Read Aloud project. It was very inspirational and hopeful to hear the tale of this women who had never used Edmodo before, but had this little idea that just grew exponentially and how the Edmodo community helped it grow so much further than she could have ever imagined.
I felt like the conference was largely for veteran users of the platform and I was a little frustrated that there weren't more "nuts and bolts" type sessions for new users. As a result, the two things that I found most useful were the talk about Edmodo's support team by Kevyn Klien and the Digital Citizenship presentation by Christine Baker.
Overall, it was a great experience. I still would like to go back and watch the few archived presentations that I didn't have energy for on the day of the event. I'm looking forward to attending again next summer when I have more of a background using Edmodo with my students.
I would love to look into Edmundo more as well, but I haven't had the time to focus on it. I'd love to hear how you plan to use it in your classroom; I can't imagine trying to sit through an 8 hour seminar, especially during the summer. I know that when I worked through a sample site for another class, I thought it had great potential, but I found that Google and Wikispaces did the same thing and I already feel comfortable with them. I look forward to hearing how you use it.
ReplyDeleteThanks,
Megan