-The Edmodo Team

Today we’d like to introduce you to some of the Edmodians that work behind the scenes – Dave, Bruno, Jose and Mark.

David Mandelin, Director of Engineering
Dave’s fourth-grade teacher showed him how to write programs to draw pictures, and he’s been programming ever since. He’s done IT apps, web applications, and research on programming tools. Most recently, he was the module owner and manager for SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript engine inside Firefox. His current role at Edmodo is to help make Edmodo great on mobile devices and support the engineering team.

Bruno Caratori, Product Analytics
Always a technology aficionado, Bruno started his career at a software startup in his homeland Brazil. He moved to Silicon Valley to get an MBA from Stanford University. At Edmodo, Bruno will be part of the Product Analytics team and will generate product insights that continue to improve our users’ experience.

Jose Guardado, Director of Recruiting
Jose has a passion for building teams. He entered the recruiting game in 2005 at a boutique firm in SF. After a brief stint selling ads for Yahoo!, he returned to the fast paced world of tech recruiting, helping to build engineering teams for Google, Cisco and most recently, Nebula. At Edmodo, Jose will lead talent acquisition across all areas, and is excited to help realize the company’s mission of reinventing K-12 education.

Mark Costigan, VP of Finance
Mark grew up outside Milwaukee and moved to the bay area in 2000 to join Commerce One. In late 2002 he moved on to Google and spent the next six years contributing to building the company’s core financial infrastructure. At Edmodo, Mark will be charged with continuing to build out financial infrastructure that will scale with the growth of our great company.

We’re hiring! If you’re interested in joining the team, check out our open positions at jobs.edmodo.com

The American Business Awards are the nation’s premier business awards program. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations and finalists are selected by a panel of more than 140 business professionals.

We are incredibly excited that the Edmodo Support team is among the top finalists for Support Department of the Year. The Gold, Bronze and Silver winners will be announced at the awards banquet on June 17. Cross your fingers for Edmodo Support! 

Details about The American Business Awards and the list of Finalists in all categories are available at www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.

UPDATE: Thanks to all who submitted. We received so many great entries, we decided to select two winners. Congratulations to Lynn Woods and Sonia Obregon….you’re going to ISTE!

The Edmodo team is preparing to go to San Antonio for ISTE 2013 and we’re looking for one super passionate Edmodo educator who’d like to join us!

In addition to meeting the Edmodo team (we’re a lot of fun!), this is a great opportunity for professional learning and networking at one of the largest Edtech conferences of the year.

As our guest, you’ll spend half of your day sharing all your awesome Edmodo experiences with educators who visit our booth and the remainder of the day going to sessions and workshops of your choice.

How To Enter

Entering to win is easy – all  you need to do is share your Edmodo success story with us. We are looking for exemplary stories of using Edmodo (especially Edmodo Apps) to create increased learning outcomes and help your students become successful.

Share your story via this form by Wednesday, May 15th. We’ll collect our favorites and select one person to win. Winner will be notified via email by Friday, May 17th. 

What You’ll Win

If selected, Edmodo will pay your airfare, lodging and conference registration. A team member will work with you to arrange your flight and accommodations upon being selected.

Note that meal reimbursements, baggage check fees and airport transportation are not included.

Program Overview

Edmodo Apps Professional Development is designed to help you find new and exciting ways to use high quality digital content as everyday tools in your classroom. Registration is $99 and includes:

• Edmodo Apps instructional video
• $99 in promotional Edmodo Store credit (upon completion of the video and survey)
• Access to an exclusive PLC where you can test drive new apps for free
• Optional Edmodo Apps assignment
• Edmodo Apps badge and certificate

Visit edmodo.com/apps-pd to learn more.

Who Should Register

Currently the program is open to all Edmodo educators who have access to Edmodo Apps. We encourage educators of all grade levels and subject areas to sign up.

PD Reimbursement

If you plan to complete a PD request or reimbursement form from your school or district, additional information is available at www.edmodo.com/apps-pd/overview

Group Registration

Schools and Districts interested in purchasing Edmodo Apps PD for a group of educators may contact institutions@edmodo.com.

Video Preview of Edmodo Apps PD 

This is a guest post from  Patrick Fogarty, Faculty Advisor of Instructional Technology at Xaverian High School, Brooklyn, New York.  If you are interested in contributing to the Edmodo Blog, please complete this form.

Introduce yourself to Patrick or follow along @fogarty22!

Mobile devices into the classroom, whether they be laptops, netbooks, or tablets, have quickly shifted from amenity to necessity. At Xaverian High School in Brooklyn, NY, I helped oversee New York City’s first iPad 1:1 integration, a grade 6-12, 1200 person deployment that required additional bandwidth, storage space, charging locations, and much more. As of today, we are one of over two dozen city schools working in iOS 1:1 environments, and we’ve had visitors from across the city and around the world in to see how we run our soon-to-be-paperless school.

Discovering Edmodo

As an Apple Distinguished Educator and conference keynote speaker, I’m often asked about my first recommendation for schools considering one-to-one programs. Step one for our school was choosing a content and/or learning management system that could connect us as an institution while also providing a safe place for individualized interactions via groups and personal messaging. That’s when we found Edmodo, which had a 90% faculty adoption rate before we even had a chance to conduct any workshops or professional development promoting it. It worked so well for such a wide variety of classes that we committed to using it for the next two years. Now, two years later, there hasn’t been any talk of reevaluating our choice. For schools looking to avoid the headache of on-site servers and in search of an intuitive, user-friendly system, Edmodo is the best solution available. Create a district-or school-level Edmodo account and begin connecting your school’s teachers to each other and the rest of the world.

Blueprint for a Successful One-to-One Deployment

With the classroom evolving at such a rapid pace, many educators and administrators are finding it difficult to remain ahead of the curve. For this reason, I wrote the book Going One-to-One: iPads and Mobile Devices in Education (available now on iTunes and Amazon) based on my experiences. It provides a blueprint for every stage of a mobile device integration, from an overview of every device class on the market to a cost breakdown for schools and districts of all sizes, to a primer on adapting lessons and digitizing course materials.  

Provide a conduit to the millions of brilliant educators blazing the same trail you are, and take great solace in the collective strength we have to initiate change and to make our students’ lives and futures better.

Download Going One-to-One: iPads and Mobile Devices in Education

This post is part of our Edmodo Spotlight series which highlights Edmodo teachers, schools and districts. If you are interested in being featured, please complete this form.

Marsha Burney works in the English Department at East Bladen High School in Elizabethtown, North Carolina.

Staying In Touch with Students

Before Edmodo, if a student had a question at night while they were doing their homework, he/she had to wait until the next day and come by my classroom.  With Edmodo, my students can easily contact me outside regular class hours (and regular school days) if they have questions or need additional assistance. Through a simple Edmodo post, I’m able to answer questions much sooner (my students and I check our Edmodo page several times in the afternoons and evenings!).  This helps my students stay more “in touch” with me.

From “Copy Queen” to Paperless

For years, I have been known as the “Copy Queen” at my school.  As an ELA teacher, I’m always looking for — and finding — poems, essays, short stories, reviews, and other resources that are not in our textbook, but excellent examples I want my students to read and discuss.  Before Edmodo, I would print and then make several copies to hand out to each student.  With Edmodo, I just attach a link to a post or place the materials in a shared folder, and the kids can access it.  In the past 12 weeks, I haven’t made a single copy on the school copier — and that is a miraculous feat for me!

Saving Time With Edmodo Quizzes

I always like to give quizzes as it allows me to make sure students are grasping the material I’m presenting. Edmodo quizzes have saved me time and made my life so much easier!  The feature offers such flexibility, including:

• Randomized questions and various questioning forms (fill in the blank, multiple choice, etc.)
• Scheduling quizzes - This allows me to plan in advance but still have the quiz on the day the students finish the material.
• Quizzes are graded automatically and students get an immediate score. Scoring information is then aggregated for me to see which questions were good ones and which were not.

Now that I have keyed my quizzes into Edmodo, next semester I can simply go back into a quiz and make adjustments for my next batch of students — most of the “work” will be done.  This is wonderful!

Co-Teaching to Meet Common Core Standards

Another English teacher and I (we teach the same courses and same levels) have always shared materials (including vocabulary lists, reading assignments, quizzes and writing assignments).  With both of us on Edmodo, we were afraid that we wouldn’t be able to share. However, we set up a class group together and enabled both sets of our students to access it.  I made the other teacher a co-teacher so she has access to all students’ scores, too.  This shared group allows us to plan together and make sure we’re both on track with the new Common Core Standards; through Edmodo, we’re making sure that all students in the same grade/same level are following the same pacing guide.

Advice for Teachers New to Edmodo

Just jump in Edmodo and play with it!  You will be surprised what you can learn and what you can do by just experimenting with its features.  Don’t hesitate and wait for specific instructions.  Forge ahead!

This is a guest post from Melissa Butler, a 6th grade Language Arts teacher from South Orange, New Jersey.  If you are interested in contributing to the Edmodo Blog, please complete this form.

Edmodo can transform the traditional chalkboard and a “turn-in-basket-classroom” into a digital, paperless atmosphere.

Making the Decision to go Paperless

I currently teach 6th-grade Language Arts in a new 1:1 learning environment in South Orange, NJ. At first, I believed setting a goal of going paperless for the 2013-14 school year was completely impracticable. However, January 2013 came and I began to ask myself, “Why are you still standing in front of the copy machine? Why are you making hundreds of copies each day, and having your students hand in paper after paper, when every one of your students has access to a provided laptop computer every day?”

That day, I  officially pledged to become a 100% paperless classroom educator.

Our 1:1 Environment

Walking into my classroom is anything but the ordinary at my school. A laptop is present at every desktop, with a charging station available at the front of the classroom. My students have access to the provided technology 185 school days a year. This didn’t happen overnight, obtaining this technology was only part of my trials and triumph. Implementing this technology and not allowing the excuse of “I can’t get used to using the tech in new ways” was the other hurdle I had to overcome. I knew that if I didn’t adapt to the new technology, the computers would just become another accessory to my classroom.

Creating a Paperless “Edu-vironment” with Edmodo

At present, there are many schools that have endless amounts of 1:1 learning environments, but is the available technology being used at the level deemed necessary to achieve the “anywhere, anytime learning?” Edmodo is your go- to website which converts your classroom instantaneously to a paperless “edu-vironment.”

Edmodo provides a plethora of opportunities. Students can turn in assignments; link their Google Docs account; complete assessments; take polls; share content and applications; and access homework, grades, class discussions and notifications. On top of this advantageous list, teachers can extend their Professional Learning Community by connecting with like-minded professional teachers from all over the world.

Reducing Paper in My Classroom

How does this equate to the reduction of paper in the classroom?

• Ability to provide instant feedback without the mountain of paperwork and create assignments and assessments within Edmodo
• With Google Docs integration, students can complete writing assignments within a Google Doc and submit them on Edmodo with annotates
• Leveraging the library feature, students have the entire curriculum at their fingertips, anywhere, anytime
• The backback component allows students to save all documents in the Cloud, thus making material binders, papers, and flashdrives obsolete
• Edmodo automatically generates a parent code, which allows daily teacher-to-parent and student-to-parent communication every day, without paper 

Join my multi-modal Edmodo journey where I have transformed my classroom from the typical ELA “paper” classroom to the atypical “paperless” classroom. Get adapted to Edmodo, where anytime learning, in both the classroom and the flipped classroom, can be accomplished from virtually anywhere.

Connect with Adam on Edmodo or follow him on Twitter @aseldow

1. Establish routines

Take control of your time by scheduling when and how long you will sift through the various bits of information you receive on both Edmodo and your school email.  To stay current with Ed Tech trends, I start my day at 5 am by scrolling quickly (15 min. or so) through my Twitter feed, adding interesting posts to my Buffer account.  After a quick workout, I head to work where I read and respond to email occasionally (20-45 min.).  Finally, at lunch I scan the latest posts using Edmodo’s filtering options.

2. Learn how to use Edmodo’s filters

Filtering in Edmodo is critical to seeing what you want to see down the middle of the screen.  Visit this link to learn more about filtering the Edmodo stream:  http://help.edmodo.com/search-and-filter-posts/.

You can filter posts that you sent to your students or other people (“by me” filtering), or you can choose to only view assignments, polls, etc.  I also pay attention to my notifications in Edmodo, but I turn off email notifications in some groups because the notifications sometimes become overwhelming.  You can learn how to manage email notifications here:  http://help.edmodo.com/account-settings/

3.  Divide and conquer

You are not alone (cue Michael Jackson…).  It may feel like it in the classroom sometimes, but you’re not.  You have a PLC or other team members who experience many of the same challenges–like how to consume all of the information you’re expected to consume.  So why not split up the responsibilities? Truth be told, the expectation that you stay current with the various content areas and your curriculum staff is not new.  What’s changed is their ability to reach out to you via a content stream in Edmodo.  This is a challenge, particularly for elementary teachers who may be part of many different content communities.  Why not assign different members of your grade-level or PLC team to stay on top of each of the content areas and report out highlights during your PLC meetings?  In essence, you’re using “human filtering.”

4.  Use the “attached to posts” and “shared with me” features in your Edmodo library

If you click into your library in Edmodo, there are several options at the top left to filter what content you see in the middle of the screen.  Most people overlook two cool features in the library:

• “Attached to posts:” Quite simply, any resource (website link, pdf file, movie, etc.) that a member of any of your groups or communities attaches to their posts is available right here rather than scrolling through all of their posts.  This is a quick way to view the resources members of your groups share.  Once you click “attached to posts,” you can use the search bar on the top to search for key words.  If you find something you want to use as a resource, you can click it and add it to one of your existing folders, or create a new folder to store it.

• “Shared with me:” Displays the folders that any member of any of the groups you’ve joined have shared with you.  These folders often have collections of materials that you can then re-share to your own groups or classes. There are excellent directions on using Edmodo’s library here:  http://help.edmodo.com/library/

5.  Accept the fact that some information will pass you by

Alas, despite our best efforts, the sheer amount of information being fire hosed at us will sometimes slip through our fingers.  Some days you will be out sick and your routines will fall by the wayside.  Other days, you might just have a case of the Mondays.  It’s my opinion that this is OK.  It used to fill me with anxiety if I missed a day or two checking my Twitter feed, and it grew to a point where I couldn’t scroll through every article.  Now, I just skip to the top when I must and figure that if the information is that important, I’ll hear about it one way or another.  While I do not recommend that this become a “standard practice,” I think we need to cut ourselves some slack and realize that humans are not computers.  We are not programmed to receive and interpret constant streams of web-based information 24/7.

Connect with Kelley on Edmodo or follow her @kelley1221

Background

I teach sixth grade language arts and religion at a Catholic school in Lexington, Kentucky. In the 2011-2012 school year, I piloted a 1:1 classroom using netbooks. The program was so successful that it led to the implementation of a 1:1 iPad program across the entire middle school for 2012-2013.

Going Paperless

Within the first month, I found that my classes were completely paperless. This was not really my intent when I began the 1:1 endeavor, but a wonderful bonus. As astonishing as it is to have a “paperless” classroom (especially language arts), being in a 1:1 environment has provided me with so many more benefits, including:

• More efficiency in assessing and differentiating lessons
• Documentation of class discussions (especially literature circles) and assignment submission
• Increased opportunities for student participation and collaboration
• Exposure to 21st century skills for students 

Making the Transition to Paperless

Before I was paperless, students would practice grammar skills exercises every day in class and then for homework. At the end of the week, they would staple them together and turn them in. I would spend all weekend grading them, sometimes realizing that students hadn’t grasped the learning objectives. This was frustrating, because I felt I had wasted a week of instruction.

I transitioned those same exercises into Edmodo Quizzes. This way, when students do the formative exercise after my lesson I can immediately see, before they leave the room, how well they understand. This is great because students will not practice something incorrectly over and over. I do the same for their homework. Since the feedback for both me and my students is immediate, I can see how well they did before they even get to school the next day.

Saving Time With Assignments

That brings me to my next time-saving, life-changing discovery – Edmodo Assignments. With the use of the “Assignment” feature, students can turn in any kind of document, I can annotate what they have written, and then they can make changes easily and quickly. I already had all of my worksheets and notes in Word documents, so it was easy to attach those to an assignment for students to fill out electronically. I can see those documents immediately when students submit them, meaning that I can have them graded before students walk into the room. I have my weekends back and it’s so much better than seeing all of those papers pile up in the “turn-in” tray and hauling them home!

Get Additional Tips

If you want more tips on how to use Edmodo to implement a paperless classroom, download my iTunes U course (Journey to a Paperless Classroom) on any iOS device.