Professional Development (PD) hours are required for maintaining teacher licenses in nearly every U.S. state. However, many states have given local school districts more authority in determining the PD content and course structure. This means that more teachers can fulfill their PD hours with content designed around local education issues. And administrators have more flexibility in the way they offer these courses. School leaders on Edmodo have even more tantalizing prospects — they can weave in these PD requirements along with more generalized training needs, all from a single interface.

PD has always been one of Edmodo’s best (and most effective) applications. Edmodo. For virtually all of the platform’s existence, educators have been using the open structure of Edmodo’s Groups for more than just teacher-to-student interactions. Last year, Edmodo formally endorsed the PD application of Groups by giving them their own dedicated section on the platform, but using Edmodo for PD has been embraced by the company since its inception. There is a long list of official conferences, organized seminars, professional workshops, and other PD events which have been hosted for free using Edmodo as their organizational backbone.

The good news for school leaders: These same services are available to you and require little setup to roll out across a school network. Whether you want to put your entire course catalog online for teachers, students, or parents to self-study, need to throw together a quick ad-hoc training session, or anything in between, Edmodo has a way to meet your needs.

The reason for Edmodo’s staggering versatility is rooted in two key design choices for the platform:

1. Edmodo is open and highly customizable. Edmodo Groups can be used for any functional or organizational purpose. Small Groups, or sub-groups, also exist within the main Groups to help further organize materials or attendees.
2. Any external material can be posted and shared. If your resources don’t exist on Edmodo, they can be linked to from an Edmodo post. You can also easily port materials to Edmodo via a number of options, including LTI.

More recent additions, such as Edmodo Spotlight, have given teachers and school leaders a variety of options for uploading quality instructional and training content into an online repository replete with marketplace features.

The result is a PD platform that, thanks to its highly customizable design, can be grown and easily adapted for nearly any training scenario. The real experts (our educators — you guys) keep coming up with new and imaginative ways to use Edmodo for PD purposes.

This is what PD in the 21st century looks like on Edmodo:

• Seminars and courses hosted online that model authentic use cases
• Organized training resources and files

• Sub-grouping participants into separate cohorts or breakout sessions
• Interactive elements such as Assignments, Polls, and Quizzes to enrich the learning experience
• Real-time backchannel discussions between participants and leaders
• Sustained learning and feedback following the seminar’s conclusion
• Connected learners and a personal learning network that transcends physical boundaries
• Participation badges for training attendees.
• And now, your vast resource library integrated into the training experience

Getting your first taste of PD on Edmodo

It may take a while to get your entire PD catalog on Edmodo, but you can whet your appetite with some quick wins.

You’re probably tired of hearing online services tell you how ‘easy it is to get started.’ In Edmodo’s case, it’s really up to you how heavily you want to frontload training on the platform. We suggest you go for a few quick wins to get a feel for the experience and build your program from there.

First, if you aren’t already registered as an administrator for your school, do so here. It’s free and only takes a 24–48 hours to get set up.

Set up some PLCs for your department leaders. You can use the PLC Creator Tool, or the regular Edmodo Group creation flow. Add in some starter resources for your members using the Group Folders. Invite your Group members. Then spark the collaboration with a prompt you think will intrigue your members and watch your PLC take off.

Add a course or two to your School Group Directory. Edmodo automatically keeps track of all PD Groups in your school. As an administrator, you can set additional Groups to appear in your Group Directory page, then let your teachers know it’s there by sending them a message on your School Page. Any teacher in your network can find and join your Group from the Group Directory page.

Upload private content to Edmodo Spotlight. Edmodo Spotlight has an option to upload resources and courses that will only be accessible by members in your network. This content can then be found in the Public Resources tab on your School Page. Using Spotlight, you can tag standards, subject areas, and much more.

Streamlining the Setup

As you grow more adept at using Edmodo for PD, you can use free support services provided by Edmodo and its partners to effectively scale it for your entire organization.

Bulk Member Upload. Up to 1,000 users can be created on Edmodo at once using Bulk Upload. Just follow the on-screen prompts to upload your roster, and we’ll do the rest.

Application Integration Partners. Integration services with leading partners, such as Clever and ClassLink, are already available to take care of setup for you. With these partners, administrators can enable real time account management, group rostering, and single sign-on.

Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI). LTI allows you to integrate your learning object repository with Edmodo, in a secure and standardized way. If you have course content hosted externally, it can be securely connected securely to Edmodo with a few clicks, making it ready for your PLC or PD Group.

Because Edmodo is such a flexible platform, you’ll probably come up with your own ideas on how you can best incorporate PD at your school. As you begin your PD journey on Edmodo, we’d love to hear how things are going. We’re all in this together!

If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to our award winning support team at adminsupport@edmodo.com.