Quite some time back I had read somewhere of this new social networking environment, Edmodo, that was being promoted as Twitter like environment being developed by teachers with an education focus. Having signed up and posted my first post on the 11th of November 2008 it wasn’t until April of the following year that I found the time to head back into my test group. At the time I figured that here was a great idea just waiting to be discovered but as I was no longer in a full time teaching position I couldn’t give it the “test drive” I really wanted to.
Last year I was able to convince a colleague to try it out with his students and soon the Senior K students were sharing all manner of information, chat and work samples. Homework tasks were distributed by Mr KT with his students uploading their responses directly into Edmodo. Parents also began to join in the space. The concept that was Edmodo was working beautifully and I was chuffed that I had played some small part in getting it going. At the same time, spruiking Edmodo became part of all of my Web 2.0 presentations.
Earlier this year I was even more excited to see that Edmodo was taking up the vacancy caused by Google swallowing Etherpad and developing Chalk as an integral part of the Edmodo suite. Again my admittedly small scale trials of Chalk showed the Edmodo team were on a winner.
Given this level of interest you would know doubt appreciate how excited I was tonight when I read the following tweet via @edmodo
Edmodo Blog Post: edmodo 3.0: a major milestone and a big thank you http://bit.ly/c0T9QF
The tweet directed Edmodo followers to the Edmodo blog which announced that
On Saturday, March 20th, we, (Edmodo), deployed the kernel of what will one day become the premier web service on the internet for the education industry.
The post then went on to detail the story of Edmodo so far beginning with Jeff O’Hara and Nic Borg starting out with the notion of and starting to build Edmodo while working in their School IT system in Chicago up until the launch of Edmodo 3. With the stated aim of creating
“A Twitter functionality with an Apple look and feel”
the group is well on the way. To get a full flavour for what the Edmodo vision is I would urge you to check out the blog post.
I for one can’t wait to get in to the new and improved version 3 to give things a shake along so if you’re wanting to sandbox Edmodo, contact me and we can get a group together. Otherwise if you are looking for a pain free, simple yet feature laden way to get your class/school into social networking then please consider giving Edmodo a try, you won’t be disappointed.
Edmodo 3; The Latest And Greatest Yet
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