About MeEdmodo (C&M Core: ICT Task 2)
The question was “How would you use Edmodo in your classroom?”, and asked to briefly (whoops) suggest an idea for how the use of Edmodo could be beneficial to your classroom. My post on the discussion board follows:
I thought of three ways I might use Edmodo in the (my? Still feels weird to say ‘my’) classroom. Note, I’m focusing on maths because that is the specialisation I am more comfortable with.
The first use of Edmodo thought of was simply linking the students to online interactable resources, like this one I just made on playing with quadratics:
I might then ask them to open it up and have a play, move each of the sliders around. I could then either have them write something describing what they think each of the sliders determined (bonus points for realising things like that b and c are interchangeable, or for insight into why those constants determine those things), or if I didn’t want to have it as an assignment I might just say I’ll ask them to explain it in the next class, or better yet, set them some questions about quadratics which they could use it to help them solve.
The second use of Edmodo I thought of was I could set an assignment/ homework where I provided them with a relatively long list of different questions they could answer (maybe 10 or so), ranging across different topics, and potentially also difficulties, and only require that they answer at least one or maybe two. Although most of the students would probably gravitate towards whichever one they think is easiest, I still see a number of valuble things in this. I get to find out which topic they think is the easiest, which probably means it is the one they are best at (might be different for different students, although them copying each other might make this difficult to judge). So topics that get the least number of answers might be ones to focus on in teaching more. Another valuble use of this could be later on in class, if there are some students who have completed their tasks and are starting to get bored while my attention is still needed on other students still struggling with whatever the current task is, I tell the bored students to go back and try some of the harder questions that never got answered, giving them something to challenge them while I continue to help with the struggling students.
Lastly, I’m not quite sure how I would use Edmodo to do this (although maybe like my first point I would just use it for distribution of another resource), but my idea was I could have an assignment/ homework something along the lines of “Go to Edmodo, click the link, and it will give you a question to answer”, and have a pseudo random number generator involved in the question generation so each students gets a slightly different question. For example the questions might all be of the form “differentiate sin(ax)”, but a could be a randomly generated number from 2 to 100. I like this idea not so much because it would stop the copying problem mentioned above, but rather because WHEN the students copy each other, say one students solves their question, and another asks them how to do it, they will probably say something like “Just take the number inside the sin and put it on the outside of the cos as well” and very rapidly they will be seeing the pattern (I hope).
Sorry for the long post…. I got carried away…
Note: APST standards linked are as specified by Jarrod Johnson (who ran the ICT component).