As I do every year, I am taking this week to relax, recharge, and ski with friends. While I’m away I will be re-running the most popular posts of the year. This was the second most popular post in July, 2014.
The integration of third party services is one of the things that makes Edmodo a good system for organizing and sharing content with students. The single log-in aspect of Edmodo gives your students access to excellent tools without having to keep track of separate user names and passwords. Whether you’re thinking about using Edmodo in the new school year or you’re simply looking for new apps to try, take a look at the following seven free Edmodo apps.
eduCanon is a free service for creating, assigning, and tracking your students’ progress on flipped lessons. eduCanon allows teachers to build flipped lessons using YouTube and Vimeo videos, create questions about the videos, then assign lessons to their students. Teachers can track the progress of their students within eduCanon. To create lessons start by identifying a topic and objective then searching YouTube and Vimeo from within the eduCanon site. Once you’ve found a suitable video you can build multiple choice questions throughout the timeline of your chosen video.
ClassCharts is an excellent tool for creating online seating charts, behavior charts, and behavior reports. ClassCharts allows you to create online seating charts for each of your classes. Through those seating charts you can record attendance, give virtual kudos to students, and record negative and positive behaviors. The information that you record in ClassCharts can be shared with parents and students through special log-ins that you supply to them. ClassCharts offers a couple of features that I really like. These features make it different from other online behavior chart services. The first feature that stands-out to me is the option to upload pictures of students to your seating charts instead of just relying on cartoon avatars. The second feature that I love is the option to invite other teachers to collaborate on the tracking of student behaviors.
Subtext is an app that you can use to create online book discussions tied directly to the text of a book. The list of the things that you can do with Subtext is quite impressive, but the basic purpose is to provide a place for teachers and students to have digital book discussion. These are some of the many things that you can do with Subtext: using Subtext you can read ebooks, annotate ebooks, create quizzes about ebooks, and write blog posts about the ebooks you read. You can create private and public book discussion groups and build bookshelves for your groups.
CodeMonkey is a simple app designed to help students learn some basic coding principles. The app presents students with a series of challenges in which they have to help a monkey reach his bananas. Students help the monkey get his bananas by correctly programming the movements of the monkey.
CK-12 Science and Math Edmodo apps make it easy to find quality practice problems for your students. You can assign the practice problems to your students through Edmodo. Students scores on the practice assessments can be saved to your Edmodo gradebook.
eduClipper is a bookmarking and digital portfolio tool for teachers and students. Teachers can now use eduClipper to create assignment portfolios. Assignment portfolios allow you to assign projects or tasks to students. You can assign a start and end date for each project. Within the assignment portfolio you can include a project / task description, links to materials, and project files such as rubrics that you either upload as PDFs or insert from Google Drive. Students submit their completed assignments through the portfolio where you can then offer feedback in the forms of text, audio, or video comments.
Disclosure: I have a small advisory role with eduClipper and a very small equity stake in it.
