Back during my TeacherHubs.com splint, I somehow corresponded with Jeff O’Hara, one of the founders of Edmodo. Edmodo is a micro-blogging service for the education niche. If you are familiar with Kevin Rose’s and friends’ Pownce.com you can easily imagine what Edmodo is, simply by imagining Pownce catered to Teachers and Students.
With Edmodo, a teacher is able to post notes, links, files, alerts, assignments and events. Each of these can be publicly accessible or private. Teachers are also able to create groups in which has a special code that can be distributed to students. A student can take the code and sign up for an Edmodo account and safely stay within the teacher’s group. Within the group a teacher, as well as students, can post information. Similar to twitter or pownce, private messages may be sent among Edmodo users. Although, there doesn’t seem to be a connected/friends/following relationship between other users. Any teacher has the ability to send a message to any other teacher. This is bound to be abused by spammers. I am sure this issue will be addressed as Edmodo obtains more users.
Edmodo has a lot of potential, especially with the passion and ambition of the educators who utilize the web (a couple who come to mind: Vicki Davis aka Cool Cat Teacher & Kate Olsen). A nice thing to see from Edmodo would be mobile integration. I am sure those iPhone lovers at Abilene Christian University might have an interest in that.
All in all, a great job by the Edmodo team. Best of luck to them and if you haven’t already, sign up for a free account!
Leave your Comment