Edmodo plays a different riff on the education Learning Management System (LMS). Instead of catering to business or higher education, Edmodo is firmly rooted in K-12 education, and rather than offering tools for creating standalone online courses, its electronic features are complementary of traditional classes and conducive to blended learning initiatives. Best of all, students, teachers, and parents can create accounts for free. (Edmodo offers school districts custom SIS integrations and custom in-person training for a fee.)
In addition to hosting the largest K-12 social learning network in the world, Edmodo (Visit Site at Edmodo) offers an extensive electronic knowledge base (Spotlight) and a series of low-stakes micro-assessments designed to boost performance on Common Core standards (Snapshots). Edmodo's approach seems to have struck a chord. With more than 80 million members, the platform shares the company of only Blackboard, Instructure Canvas LMS, and Moodle when it comes to reach.
Third-Party Integrations
Unlike peer Schoology (Visit Site at Schoology) , Edmodo does not support the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard, through which administrators might connect it with existing LMS. That said, I suspect this is more a concern for universities, many of which have invested in homegrown LMS, than Edmodo's core business, school districts. For example, Google Classroom, which is increasingly popular in K-12, also lacks LTI support. Furthermore, Edmodo integrates with the most popular K-12 School Information Systems (SIS), including Microsoft SDS, Classlink, Clever, and OneRoster. Edmodo also works with Identity Automation to offer custom SIS integrations, for a fee.
Edmodo also provides tight integrations with Microsoft and Google that allow students to log in using Google or Microsoft credentials (via SSO) and access Google Drive or Microsoft Office 365 libraries within the LMS. (In fact, for mixed platform districts, Edmodo allows students to log into both platforms simultaneously.) The platform automatically creates digital copies of Drive and 365 documents, which students may submit as assignments.
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Connections, Communities, and Messaging
Edmodo's interface ought to look familiar to anyone with a Facebook account. The most prominent feature is the Stream, which looks reassuringly similar to Facebook's activity feed. Unlike Facebook, however, Edmodo is organized around connections—not friends—and, in order to preclude cyberbullying, students can only post to classes.
In addition to connections, Edmodo supports Groups, which can be classes or ad hoc learning communities, and Communities, broader subject-area groups organized by various publishers. For example, a Professional Development (PD) directory makes it easier to find groups and members across a school district.
Edmodo LMS
Communities ought to be a resource for teachers. If I, as an educator, had a civics question, I would start by taking it to the Social Studies community, which has more than 500,000 participants.
Over the past year, Edmodo has also released a Messaging function to facilitate one-to-one and small-group communication between teachers, students, and parents. Messaging consolidates all school-related communication while protecting individuals' personal addresses and phone numbers, ideal for parent-teacher communication. To obviate cyberbullying, Edmodo integrates strict safety controls for Messaging—and across all other platform communications. Educators determine who can message whom, and students cannot contact one another directly unless a teacher is present in the Group.
Notes, Alerts, and Assignments
Naturally, teachers can do more from the stream than students or their parents can. They can filter posts by social proximity (connections, as opposed to connections of connections), author (themselves or their students), or post type. Posts take a variety of forms, including notes that contain attachments, such as links or files. With a new group copy feature, educators can repurpose an entire group's posts and resources to jumpstart a subsequent class.
Educators can use the stream to post assignments, complete with descriptions, due dates, and attachments. They can also ask students to resubmit assignments, and they can bulk-grade assignments based on who has and has not turned something in.
With the release of Assignments Center, teachers and students can easily track what's been assigned or submitted. Teachers can see who has and hasn't reviewed an assignment via Read Receipts, and students can submit their work directly from Google or Microsoft. The platform automatically sorts assignments by state (ready to grade, not turned in, graded) and records grades in the Edmodo progress book.
Outside of assignments, students can like replies, pin posts, and include @ mentions. Parents, meanwhile, can use the Edmodo Parent apps (available for both Android and iOS) to track their children's due dates and classroom activity or even sign up for emails or SMS updates, ideal for bookmarking open houses.
Quizzes, Polls, and Snapshots
Edmodo also features quizzes, which can be saved to and loaded from your library (Collection), or created on the fly. The process is dead simple: Name it, set a time limit, create some questions (they can be a mix of true/false, multiple choice, matching, short answer, or fill in the blank), and assign it to a student or group. Alternatively, teachers can send out a single question to a student or group using polls.
Perhaps the most interesting feature for public K-12 educators is Snapshot. By assigning low-stakes micro-assessments (typically just a few questions), educators can gather formative, actionable data about their students' progress toward Common Core standards (Math or ELA, grades 3-12). All the teacher has to do is select the group(s) and standard(s) she wants to assign her class. After her students respond, she can see which students met the standard, which didn't, and which were right on the edge. Edmodo automatically reassigns Snapshot to students who are behind or borderline, and it also offers recommendations for free resources that students can use outside of class.
Edmodo LMS
Spotlight (Beta)
Since I last reviewed Edmodo, the company has rolled its app store (Edmodo Store) into Spotlight, which has grown to more than 50,000 mostly free, teacher-submitted educational resources—lesson plans, worksheets, professional development courses, and even third-party apps. Edmodo describes Spotlight as Pinterest, Yelp, and Etsy rolled into one. I'm not sure it's all that, but it certainly is an interesting idea.
To test Spotlight, I shared the Ben Franklin Papers as a free resource, which I tagged as a link (Resource Type), suitable for 12th graders (Grade), studying the English Language Arts (Subject), particularly literature (Subject Area). Edmodo automatically recommended a host of possible Common Core standards, but knowing little of Common Core, I left those standards untagged. The UI still needs a little work—I missed the Title and Description fields, and I had to circle back—but once I entered the basics, I was able to publish my resource.
Edmodo LMS
Appropriate for (Small) Business
Although Edmodo is primary marketed as an LMS for schools, companies that conduct in-house training sessions might also find the tool useful. It won't work as an LMS for training companies that license out portals to clients, but it should be fine for companies that conduct occasional training sessions that need to be completed for compliance or certificate reasons.
Edmodo has also begun to offer online Professional Development courses via partnerships with New York Partners for Technology Innovation, and the University of Virginia WISE. While those courses are education-focused—some of the most popular include Tech Tools for ELL, Full STEAM Ahead, and Digital Citizenship—one could imagine how they might expand to include more instrumentalist courseware.
Business users will appreciate Edmodo's single sign-on (SSO) support, inviting interface, and low price point, but don't expect Edmodo to be the LMS for the Fortune 500. It doesn't offer the storage capacity, the live-session functionality, or assessment-management system now available from competitor Schoology. That said, Edmodo could serve as an online business learning platform through which to deliver course content to a small group of professionals.
LMS Meets Social Media Network
Edmodo is one part education LMS and two parts academic social media network. Certainly, educators can administer, track, share, and report on e-learning, but given that Edmodo is a platform for K-12 schools, e-learning is tertiary to traditional coursework. While you could compare its ecosystem with that of Blackboard (Visit Site at Blackboard for Business) , or its gamification features with those of Moodle (Visit Site at Moodle) , Edmodo better aligns with Schoology, which is a PCMag Editors' Choice for pairing the face of a social network with the foundation of an enterprise LMS. Nevertheless, Edmodo is comparable to Schoology, and features like Spotlight might well endear it to many K-12 users. Moreover, given that Edmodo is free to students, parents, and teachers, there's little reason not to try it out.
One part education LMS and two parts academic social media network, Edmodo gives K-12 teachers, students, and parents everything they need to transform traditional classes into blended learning initiatives.
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