10 Weeks In: Reflections On Edmodo (part 3)

This year I started using Edmodo instead of ProBoards as my platform of choice for our class forum.
I write about our past class use of Proboards here, and how I planned to use Edmodo in a similar capacity this year here.

This is the final part of a reflection on that decision to migrate platforms.

I created four virtual "rooms" in Edmodo for my students this year:

1) The Fantastic Forum 
2) The Homework Help Room
3) The Ape Room
4) The Reflection and Review Room 

In my previous two posts, I wrote about my experiences with the "Fantastic Forum" and the "Homework Help Room". In this final post in this series I'll discuss the last two rooms.

The Ape Room
The purpose of the Ape Room is to provide a monitored space for fun and safe content. To create a more dynamic community, my Ape Room is open to both fourth and fifth graders. My hope is that students will actually try to test the boundaries of that space. This gives me an opportunity to talk about appropriateness and audience.  I do that anyway, of course. But it's easier for students to learn from their past mistakes than from my lectures from anticipation of future mistakes.

It means that in order to have a risk-taking, mistake-making classroom, there has to be some opportunity to make mistakes. Because Batman's dad taught us that's the best way to learn.

Wait, YOU'RE Batman's dad?

And sometimes students don't know what is appropriate and what isn't. Case in point: Like most schools, probably, this video has been sweeping its way through the populace:

And like most schools younger populace, there are many that have no idea that it's a parody of Seoul's Gangnam district, and by extension, the excess and values of any rich population. What is noticeable from anyone that isn't fluent in Korean (and I'm not) is that:
1) It's strange and funny.
2) There's a close-up of a girl's butt.
3) The English in the video consists solely of "Hey sexy lady."

I'm not sure how I'd handle it if this video was posted in our Ape Room. There's content in the video that is a little too mature for my community. At the same time everyone in my class has already seen it multiple times. I'd probably remove it because it's always better to error on the side of caution. What I definitely would do is to try to put the content of the video in context, and use it as a basis for a lesson on parody. But I'll get to that.
This video wasn't posted in our Ape Room. Instead, a student posted "Teens React To Gangnam Style." The "Teens React" series is popular because apparently people like watching other people they don't know watch videos.

Let it go, Jackie

In that video, teens watch Gangnam style and provide insightful and witty comments that are neither insightful or witty or appropriate for 4th and 5th graders. So I removed it and it provided me with a teaching opportunity.

But I can and will go deeper. Because the original Gangnam style is a parody. And parodies are important to know about because:
1) Many parodies that are called parodies are not.
2) Recognizing what parodies are helps us look critically at what is being parodied, and we're not so quick to emulate the content.

So not only does the Ape Room provide us with a safe place to post and share fun content, but it also provides organic lessons that connect with our community from that content.


The Reflection and Review Room 
This is our least developed virtual space. I've mulled this over quite a bit, and for our online reflections, there are really two ways to go; using this space to reflect on specific projects and behaviors, or using the students' e-portfolios as their reflection platform.
Write now I'm using both. The kids write their original reflections in Edmodo, and copy/past them into their e-portfolios. I don't think that's the way to go, but until I figure which is the best method, I'll try them both.

I could try using a silver ball as our tool of choice

There are a couple of issues that I've discovered when using Edmodo as a reflection space:

1) Edmodo's forum, for whatever reason, seems to encourage short responses. I'm still trying to figure out why. But if I ask my kids to write a reflection directly to their portfolios, I usually get a more in depth response.
2) An e-portfolio platform is more intuitive to multiple questions and answers in a single reflection.

The only way that I can see using Edmodo as a reflective space be actually worth it is if I can get the children to feed off each other somehow. But how to do this exactly still eludes me.

10 Weeks In: Reflections On Edmodo (part 2)

This year I started using Edmodo instead of ProBoards as my platform of choice for our class forum.
I write about our past class use of Proboards here, and how I planned to use Edmodo in a similar capacity this year here.

This is the second part of a reflection on that decision to migrate platforms.

I created four virtual "rooms" in Edmodo for my students this year:

1) The Fantastic Forum 
2) The Homework Help Room
3) The Ape Room
4) The Reflection and Review Room 

In my previous post, I wrote about my experiences with the "Fantastic Forum". In this post I'll write about the "Homework Help Room".

The Homework Help Room
It's not easy being an international student in Kathmandu. There are increasing power cuts as the weather gets colder, and many kids have at least a two hour round trip commute to school each day. That doesn't leave a whole lot of time for homework on a lot of days. Coupled with that I try to give online work as much as possible, but the internet connections in this city are sporadic and slow.

"Maybe you should try not giving any work then."

Despite these obstacles, I still give homework. And because of these obstacles students have a heck of a lot of reasons why they can't do their work- some of them valid, and some of them not. To help counter this and create more of a culture of out-of-class responsibility, I try to do two things:
1) Require that children communicate directly with me, either by calling or by emailing, if they are unable to do their homework.
2) Set up the Homework Help Room in Edmodo.

The Homework Help Room is helpful in two situations:

- Homework that is given over the weekend

- Homework that involves larger projects.

It hasn't been so great with assignments that are due the next day, because I don't want to be spending my home time constantly checking it, and neither do my students. So I try to visit it a couple times in the evening, and in general this has helped with work where the kids have more time to do it. 

What I think is really nice about it though is when my students help each other.

My goal for the rest of the term is to encourage this. I can think of two ways I could. 

The first way to encourage helping is to actually build homework assignments in the homework help room. I don't like this way as much. To encourage this I could give out Edmodo's virtual badges, but I hate that way. So I'm going to dismiss this first way since it will ultimately require extrinsic motivation to encourage children to help each other. 

The second is to make a "volunteer" homework help group whose job it is to patrol the room every night. I might bring this up in a class meeting. The idea is fun and holds a certain amount of responsibility and activism so I think I'll get close to 100% of students who would like to do this. The trick is to make sure those who volunteer don't forget. But this way is driven by an intrinsic motivation so I actually think as long as there is reflection involved in the process, it will be far more successful.

The other thing I need to do is to clarify to the class about organizing their requests for help. The Homework Help Room is riddled with posts that look like this: 

Where two or more students are posting completely different problems in one thread discussion. It's hard for me to catch all of these because they're posted everywhere, so a refresher course of how to post in this room would be good for the class.

10 Weeks In: Reflections On Edmodo (part 1)

This year I started using Edmodo instead of ProBoards as my platform of choice for our class forum.
I write about our past class use of Proboards here, and how I planned to use Edmodo in a similar capacity this year here.

This is a reflection on that decision to migrate platforms.

I created four virtual "rooms" in Edmodo for my students this year:

1) The Fantastic Forum 
2) The Homework Help Room
3) The Ape Room
4) The Reflection and Review Room 

I'll talk about my observations of how each of these virtual rooms have worked in Edmodo in turn.

The Fantastic Forum 
This is the virtual room that was essentially hosted by ProBoards last year. I switched hosts because I wanted to consolidate our virtual spaces, but as a forum, Edmodo doesn't come close to the flexibility and power of ProBoards.

First, a little background.

I love the idea of a class forum for a number of reasons. It allows me to extend classroom discussions beyond the actual classroom, it teaches online discussion behavior, and it provides yet another way for the children to be exposed to writing with an authentic audience.

Edmodo does not provide as strong of a backbone as ProBoards to support all three of these goals. I'll break it down:

A) Extending Classroom Discussions
Edmodo really isn't meant to be used as a forum platform, much like Facebook isn't meant to be used in that way either. The great thing about a discussion board is that participants in any given thread have the same abilities as the person who started the thread. For example, if I started a thread called, "What's your favorite song and why?" every participant could not only answer with a reason, but they could also attach their favorite song for everyone to listen to. In Edmodo this is just not possible. I can post an initial note that embeds a song,

or a photo or a video...

But "commenters" can only respond with text. It would be brilliant if commenters could respond with multimedia, like a real forum thread:

The one nice feature that Edmodo holds over ProBoards in this regard is that Edmodo has a "Library", an online multimedia depository that organizes and holds any content that I want to share with my kids. That's a nice feature, and one that message boards don't have.

B) Teaching Online Discussion Behavior
One of the main benefits of a forum is that we can learn from each other. In order for this to be true though, we need to get in the habit of reading and commenting on each other's ideas. Edmodo is horrible at supporting this, because there is no quote function. This means that if you want to respond to another commenter, you pretty much have to write a response immediately after that commenter, or else the responses become a tangled mess:

This is annoying, and is the reason why forums invented the quote function:

It's something very simple that makes a big difference in both how we view and interact with online discussions. Instead of responding only to the person who started the discussion, students can begin to interact with the larger online community.

C) Writing For An Authentic Audience
Both ProBoards and Edmodo is by invitation only. Anyone with an email account can apply to be a member of a board I set up in ProBoards. Any one with a group code can join a virtual room in Edmodo. This is great because I think it's important for students to be able to write to a larger audience beyond their teacher and even their classmates. Ideally parents could join the forum and the discussion. The difference is how Edmodo views its participants. You're either a teacher, a student, or a parent. If you're signed in as a parent though, you only have access to your child's grades or specific notifications regarding assignments or upcoming events- all the ways that I don't use Edmodo with my kids.

Parents don't have access to the virtual rooms. In order for the parents to participate in room discussions, they have to register as students. This is an added level of inconvenience and weirdness. I haven't attempted to ask parents to pose as fake students so they can participate in our class discussions.

So does it make sense to continue using Edmodo as a forum? I'm not sure. The advantage is that it helps consolidate our online presence, which is extremely important for this age group. Consistency and simplicity are key factors to building online behaviors, and exposing the kids to too many tools would be both overwhelming and counter productive. On the other hand Edmodo is not meant to be a true forum, and perhaps I'm breaking one of my cardinal rules: Never use a technology for a purpose other than what it's designed for.

I guess I have the rest of the year to figure it out.

In my next post I'll discuss the class' experience with the three other virtual rooms I set up in Edmodo.

Class Meeting and Survey Monkey

Every Wednesday our class has a Class Meeting. This is a deviation from our normal Morning Routine. It gives a chance for our class to talk about important community issues, and empowers the students as agents of change. Our Class Meetings our a combination of the Responsive Classroom approach, and Donna Styles' approach.

Anyway, this post isn't about how I structure class meetings. Instead it's about one particular class meeting- The last one I had with my fourth graders, and a last-second decision that ended up being pretty cool. 

Our focal point of this particular class meeting was to vote on this year's Elementary T-Shirt designs. The students had created designs in art class using the Drawing app in Google Drive. The problem was as I got to school and started to prepare for the day is that I found I didn't have access to their designs. They hadn't been shared with me yet. What I would have normally done was to present each of the drawings to the class on the SMART Board and have them vote for the top three. 

Our 4th Grade T-Shirt Designs

But because I didn't have access to their drawings from my account, I couldn't do that. This made me realize of an alternative route. I remembered that our class houses the floor's laptop cart. So I thought we could bring our laptops to our class meeting, and have each student show their design. 

But then I thought about voting. Normally I have the children close their eyes to vote for things.  But since they were going to have their laptops anyway, I thought about using an online voting tool.
At first I thought I might be able to use Edmodo's polling feature, but I wanted voters to vote for multiple people. I don't know if this is possible in Edmodo. I don't think it is.
Then I remembered Survey Monkey.

I've tried to use Survey Monkey before when I tried to migrate our Elementary After School Activities sign-ups to be wholly electronic.  Survey Monkey and other web-based surveys* were terrible for this. But there are a sub-genre of web based tools specifically for sign-ups, which was just recently pointed out to me.

However Survey Monkey seemed to be the perfect application for this day's task. I opened it up, designed a survey in 5 minutes, and emailed the link to my students' accounts.
Showing off the T-shirt designs on the individual laptops was a bit clumsy, but the voting was slick, anonymous, and quick. The results, of course were instantaneous. It was awesome. A nice alternative to the "heads down" approach. When I have class voting in the future, Survey Monkey will be how I prefer to do it.

*Actually, Fluid Surveys had a paid feature where what I needed was promised to be possible. However the feature was broken. The support team couldn't figure it out, and so I got a refund. Our After School Activities remained paper-based until this season. But I finally found a way to make the transition from paper to the cloud.

The Chronicles of Harris Burdick

I wrote about a Harris Burdick writing unit a little over a year ago.

Here are the pictures that are at the heart of this unit:


A couple of days after I created that post, The Chronicles of Harris Burdick came out. I picked it up this summer. Here is a really cool and really poorly acted trailer for this new book:

I love all the authors this features! I loathe their acting! But I still enjoy watching it.
I started reading this book yesterday and I'm about half way through. What gave me an idea for this post though is my favorite story so far, "A Strange Day In July" by Sherman Alexie.
The story that Sherman Alexie created comes from this illustration and caption:

"He threw with all his might, but the third stone came skipping back"

There are a few reasons why I'll use this story as a mentor text when teaching this fiction unit.

Character Development
The first is character development. The characters in this story are superb. Their strange and mean. They terrorize animals and old ladies. Their twins but pretend to be triplets. So this story used in conjuction with Nancie Atwell's Main Character Questionnaire could help children think of great characters to fill their stories:

1. What’s your name?

2. How old are you?

3. What’s the problem you’re facing?

4. What’s your family background?

5. Where do you live?

6. What do you like to do?

7. What’s different about you?

8. What do you care about? What do you want?

9. What do you fear?

10. What are your dreams?

11. Who are the important people in your life?

12. What are the important things in your life?

13. How will you change through confronting your problem? Possibilities:

14. What will you understand about yourself and your world at the end of

the story? Possibilities: 


Author Craft
The voice of this story is fresh and original, full of author craft that can be pointed out and emulated.
Here is an example passage:

Heck, if they had discovered severed thumbs in the middle of their ice cream Timmy and Tina would have just licked them clean and dropped them into a fish tank.
Okay, that's not true
....
When Timmy and Tina walked in the woods, the birds would shake their tail feathers and flutter their wings and sing, strange kids, strange kids, strange kids. 
Okay, that's not true, either.
But Timmy and Tina scared birds. And they scared dogs. Heck, the lions at the zoo would cover their faces with their paws whenever Timmy and Tina came to visit.
Okay, that's not true at all.


The playfulness of the description, oscillating between something true and something false throws off the reader. They don't know what to expect, and what to believe. It also gives a creepy, mean story a much needed sense of lightness.


The Ending
In the few years that I've taught this unit, I've never had a student make the caption to the picture the last sentence of the story. But it makes perfect sense, leaving the reader with as much wonder and curiosity as the potential writer has when they first see the illustration. It's an extremely effective craft for this type of project.