Schoology vs. Edmodo?

                              vs.

As an EL teacher at an elementary school, I work with several groups of students in multiple grade levels and in various subject areas......so, as you might expect, the management of student materials, resources and papers can be (in a word) overwhelming.  In an effort to streamline the management of these materials and provide students with an interactive and accessible virtual classroom space, I have been trying out edmodo.com and schoology.com with different groups of students.

Both edmodo.com and schoology.com offer a variety of important features for students and teachers, including:

• a network of educators who use the site (including discussion boards for groups of educators)
• searchable public resources for different subject areas
• safe, invite-only virtual classroom spaces, managed by a teacher
• online student discussion boards, quizzes, and assignments, as posted by the managing teacher
• online progress monitoring, managed by teachers, but accessible by students and authorized parents
• linking to/embedding other sites, such as Google Docs, School Tube, Youtube, etc.
• uploading and storing documents and PDFs (teachers)
• embedded app stores for easy access to featured and other apps for learning
• accessible 24/7 by students and teachers

While all of these features are helpful, I came to realize that I have a few, more specific features that I am looking for in an online platform to really cater to my needs and the needs of my students:

• teacher can include visuals in posts to students
• students can interact via real time discussion boards
• students can create and maintain a blog as a part of the same online platform
• students can immediately view the results of quizzes, and can be given the option to re-take the quiz when they are ready
• teachers can upload existing quiz questions from other mediums (ExamView)
• teachers and students can link their account with their school Google Docs account

Based on my experiences so far with edmodo.com and schoology.com, I have found schoology.com to be a better match for my students and I (schoology.com includes all of the specific features I was looking for...and more!).  With that said, I feel like edmodo.com is, at this point, more established and has more public lesson resources available for teachers.  So, there are certainly pros and cons to both sites. 

Here is an example of a reading comprehension activity I posted on schoology.com for a group of 6th grade English learners:

I got the non-fiction passage and questions from readworks.org, posted the reading to schoology.com for the students, and then inputted the 5 questions and correct answers into a quiz format.  schoology.com grades each student's answers when they are submitted and will transfer them to my gradebook.  Voila!!

Do you use an online platform with your students?  If so, what do you use and why do you like it?

Blogging with English Learners

With the first few days of school behind us, I know many students (and teachers) are ready and anxious to really get started with this year's learning. The milestones that everyone talks about stick out like neon signs to students in the fall...I am so glad I'm finally in 3rd grade so I can learn cursive, multiplication and division! Isn't 6th grade when we get to engineer robots? My brother told me all about the states research project in 4th grade and I want to choose Minnesota.

I love hearing students express their excitement about upcoming topics of study, and am always interested in ways to channel and extend their enthusiasm throughout the year. I also want students to be able to archive their work so that they can share their learning with others and look back in a year or two (or ten) and reflect on the all that they've done.

The 3rd grade teachers in my building began having students blog about their experiences during the school year, sort of like an online journal. The kids loved it because it gave them an authentic purpose for writing (they had an audience who could..and did... comment on their posts!), because they could add their own photos, audio clips and videos to supplement their blog posts, and because they could easily go back and make changes (from school, home, or anywhere) if they discovered mistakes or wanted to revise what they'd written. After hearing about the success of blogging from my colleagues (and their students), I knew I wanted to try it out with my English learners.

I decided to have my 5th grade ELs try out blogging as a part of our fiction and nonfiction literature circles (which we called book club). In class, we chose literature circle roles for the week, and each group decided on the number of pages they wanted to read. Then, usually on Thursdays, we spent our time together blogging about what we read: everyone wrote a summary as a part of their post, and then they recorded their lit circle role for the pages read. On Fridays, we discussed our literature circle role responses together and then had time to read and respond to each others' blog posts. My students really loved reading the responses to their posts and answering their classmates' questions -- both on their blogs and in person.

Blogging was a great motivator, and we eventually discovered that we wanted to delve deeper into many of the topics we were reading about...by the end of the year last year, our literature circles had morphed into very motivated inquiry circles. I can't wait to use blogging again this year with students!

Blogging platform used: kidblog.org

Here are a few snapshots of our blogs:

My initial blog post:

And here are a few examples of student blogs: