Edmodo: Educational Microstreaming… And More?

I recently stumbled upon Edmodo, which is a clever and lean microstreaming application designed for education. The basic premise is that teachers can signup, and invite students to ‘groups’ (which should be called ‘classes’, I guess).

One of the things that is attractive about Edmodo is that there is not very much you can do. Teachers can create groups (presumably equivalent to classes), and then, in the context of groups, they can create events (tests, etc.), assignments, upload files, create links, and post notes, replies, and alerts. Students have more limited capabilies: they can post notes, send messages, upload files, and create links. Oh, and respond to assignments created by teachers.

These posts all stream by in the group, and in the personal stream of all the participants who have access to them.

A Shallow Dive

Here’s an assignment I created in a teacher account for a group called ‘/Message’. Note that only students can take on and complete assignments, and as a result, a teacher can’t use assignments as a way to track tasks for themselves.

edmodo | home, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I think Edmodo should incorporate a task or to-do post, since there are other things that need to be tracked, not just assignments to be turned in. Students and teachers alike could then create tasks for themselves to help plan and accomplish work.

Here’s an example of how the simple ‘reply-to’ feature allows groups to coordinate:

edmodo | home, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Teacher invite the students by sending a code, presumably by email, which the students use to join the assigned groups. Then the students sign up with the code, or join the group if they already have an account.

Direct messaging between individuals is supported, and teachers can alert groups: basically a group dm.

But another limitation is that only teachers can create events. That might be alright if students can create tasks for themselves, but otherwise the benefit of a calendar in the application is really diminished if only teachers can add items to the calendar. Here’s the calendar view:

edmodo | calendar, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Edmodo supports making posts within groups public, which then are published as completely accessible HTML pages on the web, but only the creator of the group can mark posts as public. Likewise, there is an RSS feed associated with the public posts from each group.

And More?

I admit I have some self-interested notions to consider the application of Edmodo outside the educational context it so carefully has been designed for. Imagine its use in the slapdash world I live in. I really want a lightweight microstreaming application to coordinate with others, and not for the purposes of education. And I think Edmodo could serve.

I experimented with having multiple ‘teacher’ accounts, and teachers can join groups created by other teachers. And in that context, all the teachers can do everything: post notes, direct message others, create events, make assignments, and send alerts. The only thing missing are tasks, and/or the ability to assign work to yourself. And again, only the creator of a group can mark something as public.

To use Edmodo instead of something like Basecamp or Backpack (the latter is what I have been using most recently) seems feasible, but I really want tasks, and a little text styling.

In recent months, I did a deep dive into Drop.io, which I had to drop: I returned to using Backpack, but the lack of replies to posted notes in Backpack is simply crazy, as is the chronological display of posts. I am going to give Edmodo a test, and see where it leads.

So, in essence, Edmodo — when all the members of a group are ‘teachers’ — provides a simple, lightweight, and free microstreaming application that is designed for education, but can be redirected to more general purposes.