BAM! I discovered another fantastic Web 2.0 tool to use within the elementary classroom. I have always desired to use a social networking site in class that was a little more age-appropriate than Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. After searching around for the perfect tool to implement this type of learning style within the classroom, I stumbled upon Edmodo! So what is it? Edmodo is a fantastic mix of the three networking sites mentioned above, but is legal, safe and free to use with elementary students.
Basically, Edmodo offers online tools to make it easy in creating an online community in and outside of the classroom. This social networking site enables students to post anything from general posts on the message board (Twitter-style), sharing ideas, classwork, and files, along with mobile access and messaging! The really cool thing about Edmodo is students can subscribe to RSS feeds to specific topics being discussed in the classroom, making this a true Web 2.0 tool. This not only automatically creates a community of engaged learners, but it encourages students to share with students, parents, and others with what is happening in school. And we all know that getting students to discuss what they are learning in school is never an easy task (no matter what age)!
I actually plan to use Edmodo for part of my Action Research Project (ARP) in using a Web 2.0 tool to engage students of all multiple intelligences along with connecting and informing parents of events going on with my class. I seem to always run into the problem of engaging ALL of my students not only in class, but also when learning is extended at home. Whether that is in homework form, studying for a test, or creating groups to communicate about a project outside of school. My goal with using Edmodo is bringing all students to the same playing field when it comes to communicating and working together in teams. I teach at an elementary school to where students rotate classrooms in a sort of block schedule setting in hopes to prepare them for middle school, high school, and ideally college. I can use Edmodo to set up several classes that I associate with throughout my day. Edmodo makes it incredibly easy to do this and creates an environment of high media literacy among all of my students. To wrap all of this up nicely with my ARP, I plan on using Edmodo to keep all of my parents informed and create a
higher success rate with the triangle of communication between teacher, student and parent. There are many more attributes that you can do with Edmodo, but I will leave that for you to go and discover at
http://www.edmodo.com So there you have it.... Edmodo is the ideal way to implement age-appropriate media literacy to connect, engage and inform within the elementary setting.
The two photos used in this blog are from Flickr, licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 License
Photo Attribution:
hugovkCTJOnline
It was a matter of learning some code, but the Lynda.com tutorials really made it easy to understand how to open the script page and insert language that would be understood in making actions happen the way I want them to. 
