Creating a Community with Edmodo

Edmodo is a free social network that can be used by teachers and students. It is a great tool for collaboration and can be accessed from any web-enabled device including smartphones and iPads.

Edmodo has many great features:

• Student accounts that do not require email addresses
• No games or advertisements
• Safe environment where the teacher controls who can join
• Ability to include files and links in a student/teacher generated post
• Share assignments with the class
• Create online quizzes
• Tag posts to better organize content
• Keep an online calendar or gradebook
• Organize classroom documents using the library feature
• Create small groups within a particular class for easier communication

Recently I had the opportunity to work with middle school English and French classes on two very different Edmodo projects. For the English class the students joined an Edmodo group as one of the main characters from the book they were reading. The students created journal posts in their character’s voice essentially producing an online diary.  In French class students had the opportunity to join Edmodo to communicate with a partner classroom in France. Each of the two classes joined the same group in Edmodo giving the students the ability to communicate with each other while being safely managed by their two co-teachers.

To learn more about using Edmodo in your classroom check out Edmodo’s Help Center or the videos on the Edmodo SchoolTube channel. Edmodo also provides a series of webinars. To access the Edmodo app for mobile devices go to iTunes for the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad and Google Play for Android devices.

Microsoft Office in the Cloud

Recently I have been experimenting with cloud-based solutions for using Microsoft Office with my Mac, PC, and iPad.

Photo Credit: zdnet.com

This past week I downloaded the OnLive Desktop App to my iPad. The OnLive Desktop App provides users with a Windows 7 experience on the iPad. With this free application users are able to use Office 2010 Word, Excel, PowerPoint along with a handful of other apps like Paint and Notepad. After you sign in to your OnLive account you are taken to a virtual Windows 7 screen. From there you can start a new Office document from scratch or you can access any documents that you have uploaded to your OnLive account. You can access your account through a web browser and upload documents to your account from either a PC or a Mac. All your files are seamlessly synced to the OnLive servers and your free account gives you 2GB of storage.

Photo Credit: theiospost.com

Another great cloud-based solution for using Microsoft Office products is CloudOn. CloudOn is very similar to OnLive Desktop in what it has to offer. One difference is that CloudOn uses a DropBox account to sync your files to the cloud. CloudOn provides you with the same amount of online storage as OnLive since a free DropBox account gives you 2GB of space. Since I have DropBox already installed on my local machine I find it very easy to have my documents ready to use with CloudOn without having to log in to another account to upload docs. DropBox can also be easily accesed from a web browser.

The look and feel of the two programs is very different. CloudOn is more of streamed version of Microsoft Office while OnLive Desktop gives you the virtual feel of working in the Windows environment. CloudOn only offers Word, Excel, and PowerPoint where OnLive Desktop has some additional Microsoft Programs. Try out both and see which one works for you.