“Facebook” for Kids!

A few months back my very best friend (who is also a teacher) told me about Edmodo. Edmodo is a safe and secure learning community for students, parents and teachers. She compared it to Facebook and when I went on and checked it out, it even looked like Facebook. She was using it with her third graders and sixth graders. I wondered if there would ever be a place for such a resource in kindergarten, so I decided to find out.

When my kiddos completed their farm research projects (see that post here), they were disappointed to find out that I had to keep them for their permanent ELA folders. They were SO proud of them that they wanted to keep perusing them and reading each other’s. I decided I would give Edmodo a whirl and let the kids go online and interact with each other by commenting on each other’s projects, etc. As I expected, the kids loved going on Edmodo because they love any opportunity to use the computers! I was lucky and had 5 computers in my classroom this year, so getting the kids online was not too hard. I started by introducing Edmodo as a whole group activity. I would log in as myself and project the website on our Interwrite board. Then I would walk through the different features of it and show the kids how I posted their projects. They were thrilled! They had so much fun seeing their hard work appear on screen. Many of the kids who use computers and iPads at home often had no problem manipulating Edmodo with minimal assistance from me. Those students were even able to help some of my other kids change their profile pictures and locate what they were trying to find on the site.

Whole group lesson with Edmodo.

Helping each other find the games that Miss Eager posted!

After they learned how to go on, they enjoyed voting on different class polls and accessing links that I posted for some of their favorite websites. I would even catch some of them at free time logging in and looking at their own projects over and over again. 🙂

Exploring her own profile after she changed her picture to a soccer player!

As I started exploring Edmodo more, I realized it would serve as such a great class website for parents, teachers and students (too bad for me I didn’t start until the end of May!) Since it is a secure site meant for educational use, there is no public access for your profile or class page. Students need a special group code to join a class, and then when a student joins, the parents join with another group code that is specific to their child.

Since you have to be a member of my class to view our page, I took screenshots to give everyone a sneak peek into what Edmodo is all about and how I used it toward the end of the school year. I have recently realized some of my kindergartners come to school knowing how to navigate technology better than me because they have been exposed to it their entire life. It is so important for educators to keep up with the times and embrace the progress! Edmodo is such a great way to embrace that change while engaging students and promoting literacy and technology.

This is what my home page for my class looks like.

I love their comments! The post said “What other facts do you know about this animal?”

Here is one of the polls we did and a link to a website that my students love to use.

I love this feature because I am a calendar enthusiast!

To read about the Terms of Service and privacy of Edmodo, click here. Edmodo requires that students under 18 have parental consent to use Edmodo, so I sent home a permission slip before creating usernames for my students.