Edmodo: an educational alternative to Twitter

As you might gather from some of my previous posts, I'm a big fan of Twitter for both personal development and as an educational tool for students. However, one thing it's not that great for is setting up private groups, e.g. for a particular class or group of students. A colleague suggested using Edmodo as an alternative and I've just started using it with one of my groups.

I'm impressed...very impressed. It's perfect for setting up a private group/network for your groups and you have a lot more options in terms of what you can send to your students. You can set up multiple classes and control which messages/attachments go where. So, for example, I might want to send a document/file to an individual student in a class, a whole class or all my classes and all of this is possible from the homescreen. You can also embed You Tube videos, set assignments, create polls or send links. Here's a screenshot of the homepage.

One interesting aspect is that students are restricted to only sending messages to either the whole group or to the teacher...they can't send messages privately to each other. You can see the logic here, particularly if you have younger students, as it could easily just become a private chatroom for them. I teach fairly responsible adults so that's not such a big issue for me and it would be nice to have the ability to switch that option on or off. However, students can reply to each other's posts, but the reply is displayed publicly.

Today with my students I got them to sign up, we did a few practice posts so they got the idea, then I got them to look at some websites our teaching centre has up on Delicious. They then wrote short descriptions/evaluations of them and posted them to the group Edmodo site. Here's a screenshot to show you some of the things they came up with:

They took to it very quickly, even those who are not that technically proficient and they were posting links within minutes after being guided through the sign up and posting procedure.

 I can see this as being a great way for me to share materials/links/messages with the group and for them to share with each other and me. It's certainly a lot less cumbersome than using the university's VLE (Blackboard), which many of the students don't use very often because it's so confusing to navigate around. One immediate use for me is to be able to quickly share all my Interactive Whiteboard notes that I've saved after a lesson. Normally, I post these up on Blackboard, but this is a much quicker way for my students to access them.

Another good thing (especially for this blog!)  is that Edmodo have created a mobile version of their website for easy access on students' phones. Here's a screenshot of how it looks on my phone:

You can see this is a stripped down version of the main site, but all the basic functionality is there. A few of my students have smartphones like the iPhone or higher-end Nokia phones, so I showed them how they could access the mobile site on their phones. Unlike Twitter though, there doesn't seem to be an option to receive notifications via SMS, at least not in the UK. On the settings page you can enable this, but it didn't seem to work for me, so I'm assuming this may only be available in the States for now.

Anyhow, over the next few weeks I hope to explore how Edmodo can be used with my group and how they respond to it. Naturally I will share this all with you. If you want to learn more about how to use it, here is a great video tutorial.

Professional development and personal help from Twitter

Today more than any other day made me realise just how useful Twitter is as a way of connecting with other teachers round the world, but also as a way to stay informed and up to date about happenings around the world.

On the professional side, it enabled me to stay in touch with the big IATEFL conference taking place this week in Harrogate. I couldn't go for a variety of reasons but following the events online, particularly via Twitter from some of the more tweet-happy delegates really helped me get a sense of what a lot of the sessions were about. I was pretty busy today doing the shopping, taking my son to the park and some other little tasks, but I was constantly able to check my phone to read a little of what was going on there. Big thanks to the likes of Shaun Wilden, Gavin Dudeney et al who provided excellent summaries and commentaries on the sessions.



At the same time me and my wife were anxious to find out about the situation in Kyrgyzstan where there is a coup underway and tremendous civil unrest. My wife is from there, I lived there myself for four years and we were obviously concerned about what was going on there, particularly for the sake of my wife's family.

Again, despite a busy day we were able to keep up with the events there and through a mixture of SMSes and Twitter feeds we were able to establish the well-being of her family and also receive up to the minute info about what's going on there.



The term 'social networking' has always been a bit of a misnomer when it comes to Twitter. For me it's a way to stay connected, involved and informed about things that matter in my personal and professional life and to be able to do that from anywhere.

How to Use Twitter with an ESL group

In a previous post I briefly talked about Twitter and how teachers could use it as a resource for lesson ideas and material. However, after having used it with a group here at my school, I think I have some suggestions as to how it could be used with students to help them learn English more effectively. Here are some initial ideas:

1. Create a private Twitter group.

This is not really an activity as such, more a useful thing to do to make sure that all the information shared on Twitter is private to your class (unless of course you want to share it with other people). It's a little confusing to set up, but once you do the students grasp the concept very easily. You can use this service to set it up and they give a fairly clear explanation of what you have to do in the FAQs. If you want your students to be able to receive group posts on their phones and to be able to post from their phones, this help page is useful.


2. Posting useful links to ESL content for your students

We want our students to take every chance to learn outside the classroom, and one way to do this is to point them towards any interesting sites/material you find online for them to use. If you don't know where to find such material, this is a fantastic site to start with. It gives you video explanations of lots of great ESL sites for both students and teachers. To show you this in practice, here's a picture of a part of our Twitter group page with some links I've found.

3. Vocabulary/grammar questions for students.

Students responded well to this - better than my more general attempts to generate conversations through the Twitter group - I think because the format of Twitter lends itself well to it. I would simply give an expression and an example of use and then ask the students to guess the meaning from the context. Here's an example:

4. Get students to share new language

This is something that I do regularly in my normal classes, particularly at the beginning of the week I get students to share any 'new' words or expressions they came across over the weekend, either in books, adverts or on the web. However, this is definitely something that could be done very effectively on Twitter and it could be done on a rolling basis as students come across new language.

5. class notices/homework etc.

Applicable to all classes not just ESL, but Twitter is a really nice way to remind your students about things, trips, homework, things they need to bring to class next lesson. If they can get into a habit of using it regularly it can become a real noticeboard for the class.

I think there are a multitude of uses of Twitter in the classroom. Just take a look at this post explaining 100 uses of Twitter for academics (admittedly some of them are pretty thin as any list comprising of a 100 items would have to be). But there is a lot of stuff out there on the web exploring how it can be used inside and outside the classroom to enhance students' learning and I'll be definitely exploring this with my class in the coming months

Backchannelling as a means of feedback in class

I've just read an interesting article about the use of backchannelling in class as a means of getting feedback from the students, checking their understanding. What's suggested in the article seems somewhat similar to what's presented in this video from a professor at the University of Texas.



I think this idea of several 'conversations' going on in the classroom at the same time is an interesting one, particularly if you are lecturing to large groups of students. A great way to involve large groups and at the same time not necessarily disrupting the flow of the presentation or discussion. I think it would be particularly good for collecting questions to be answered at the end of the lesson.

For me, I don't really lecture, I'm more of a classroom teacher and my classes are quite small (normally between 10-14 students); however, I can still see situations where this would be useful. Maybe students have questions not directly related to the topic of the lesson (maybe a word they remembered or an expression the teacher used)and they would like to know about it. They could post it to a Twitter feed or Facebook and we could then either take a look at them at the end of the lesson time permitting or they could be picked up on in future lessons.

My only concern about this is that I'm not sure how realistic this would be for my students to be able to actually do during the lesson. You can see in the video that many of the students are using their laptops to tweet their ideas, but my students don't really bring computers to class since it's not just about taking notes. So they would have to be able to do it via their phones and while there is an easy way to do this - you can easily tweet via SMS - I'm not sure there is a cheap way. Each time they sent a message they would be charged by their carrier. I don't want my students' decision to contribute to be based on their data plans rather than on how much they have to say.

I would be interested to know whether there are any alternatives, possibly via bluetooth. I'm pretty sure all my students have bluetooth on their phones and we have computers in every classroom, so there must be some way for them to send messages that way and have them show up on the computer and subsequently the board (since we have SmartBoards in all our classrooms). Does anyone know of any way that messages can be sent via a mobile phone and then displayed on a computer screen? I think this would be a much more efficient way to doing this.

It's something I'm going to look into, but if anyone has any suggestions they would be most welcome. In fact, I'm wondering what other ways bluetooth can be used in class. After all, all phones have it these days, it's perfect for transferring pictures/files etc and most importantly it doesn't cost anything.

Well, once the new term starts I'm thinking I might try this with one of my groups and see if it works.

How to involve more members in my mobile group?

In my previous post I described how I got my Twitter group off the ground and students were beginning to sign up and make their initial posts. I think now I've got 12 students signed up. To encourage students to respond I tried to post a steady stream of useful language learning links as well as put up a question of the day for them to answer.

Two of the students have really taken to it and they are following the links, responding to the questions, and it's great. But from the rest there doesn't seem to be the same level of interest and they haven't really posted at all.

I need to try to find out why the other students don't seem so engaged. Maybe they thought this group was going to be something different, maybe more SMS based, but I've been trying to avoid doing everything through SMS because of the potential cost to them of responding via text.

Maybe they just aren't reading the tweets! I'm not sure that every member has regular access to a computer, so today I wrote to all of them by SMS and explained how they could send and receive tweets via their mobile phone - as this is after all supposed to be a mobile phone group. Anyhow I think a short survey might be useful to find out what their expectations might be

This week I will continue with the Twitter feed but also try something else to see if it interests or involves more of them. Maybe something via text, a Word of The Day or something similar. Anyhow, I'll keep trying and see what interests/involves them..

Growing Pains of my mobile ESL group

In my previous post I wrote that I had finally set up my group and was in the process of trying to get all the members signed up to a private twitter group. We're not quite there yet, but ten of them have now registered for Twitter and have successfully added at least one post to the timeline. Very impressed because I'm not sure I fully understand how it's all working...but it is. Anyhow, here's a snapshot of the Twitter page just to prove it.



It may look like I'm the only one posting but that's just the nature of a Twitter group, everything is via the group name and the individual is identified with the prefix 'via'.

I've written to all the group members to explain how the Twitter group will work. Every day I will post a question for them to respond to, and I will regularly post links for language learning sites and information/links for how to use their mobile phones for improving their English. I've also explained to them how to post to Twitter from their phones as I suspect most of them are using their computer at the moment. But that's ok, I think it will take time for them to get comfortable using their phones for things other than voice and text. Slowly, slowly.....

My mobile group has started!

The poster campaign to get students to sign up didn't work, not one response and I suppose fittingly it was only when I sent out a block SMS to all the students at the school that I got some kind of response.

In fact, I've now got 12 students signed up and I expect at least a few more over the next few days. I've capped the group at 20, though I don't think I'll get that many.

Ok, now comes the tricky part working out how to structure it. My basic idea for the group is to set up one or two core streams of information and communication. Initially I thought about relying purely on SMS with members communicating with each other and me through texts. I abandoned that idea when I realised it might prove quite expensive for some of them. I'm on an unlimited text plan so it's not a problem for me, but I'm sure that's not true for most of them and sending out group texts might prove expensive. I really want to minimize as much as possible their costs for doing this.

So I did a bit of research and came up with the idea of using a private Twitter group as the main form of communication. The main benefits of this are: firstly, most phones (even lower end ones) have some kind of twitter client available to them, and secondly, it's possible to send and receive tweets from the group via SMS. This means that the students can send one SMS message and it will be received by all the members of the group, either via their twitter client or their SMS inbox. There may be better solutions available, but this seemed the best temporary way to get around the range of handsets and dataplans they have.

This of course is probably the biggest challenge of setting up a mobile group. Some of the students have the latest handsets with all the newest features (wifi, 3G, Bluetooth, GPS etc) and all you can eat dataplans. Others, however, are using minimal data on Pay As You Go and have basic handsets with only voice and text functions. While mobiles can be seen to democratize the learning process (available all the time), those with more money are still likely to get a richer experience. So, by using Twitter groups I'm hoping to level things out a little for the members of the group.

So, this week will be spent setting up a private Twitter group and then trying to explain to them how to sign up for it - a not inconsiderable task given the range of English levels and technical knowledge among them. I really want to do as much of it as possible via their phones, though to sign up for twitter some of them are clearly going to have to use a computer. By the end of this week I will be very happy if every member has posted just once to the group!

In the following weeks I will then experiment with a variety of mobile learning opportunities - IM chats, sending quizzes/materials via SMS, polls via SMS and others I've yet to research. But student feedback about these, any messages from me, indeed any random thought they want to share can be done through the Twitter group. We'll see how it goes, I'm genuinely very excited about this...