Thank you for a successful Year
With the school year coming to a close for most of the U.S., Nic and I wanted to send a big thank you to all the Edmodo users that have helped make Edmodo a success. It has blown our mind since launching in September of 2008, 37,786 students and teachers have signed up for Edmodo, created 6,799 groups, and posted over 320,000 times.
I really don’t want to reflect that much on our past year as one’s past does not dictate the future. There are lots of exciting changes coming in Edmodo and that’s what I’m going talk about below.
Edmodo going forward
Nic has been hard at work coding version 3.0 which we hope to release in a few weeks so you will have a chance to play and get accustomed to it before the new school year starts in the fall.
The biggest change for the end-user is how replies are handled. Replies will be handled inline underneath posts instead of being treated as a new post and going to the top of the stream. If your familiar with comments on Facebook then you will have no problem adjusting to the new reply system on Edmodo. This has been our most frequent request since launching Edmodo.
The next biggest change is the right hand side panel for Alerts, Assignments, & Events with be going away in favor of a Spotlight area which will highlight anything new in your Edmodo stream, including replies, assignments, upcoming events, and more.
Edmodo 3.0
Another thing that you may notice is a much speedier experience. Nic has been hard at work on a new caching system that will eliminate the need to hit our database as much navigating your streams.
One question I have been asked a lot is how we are going to monetize. Edmodo is a free product without any advertising. Now is the time for us to begin answering this question. The Edmodo that you know and love will continue to be free, but we are going to be adding premium applications and features that will be able to be added on top of the free product. Our goal is start off with at least 3 premium applications for the fall and continue to add more throughout the year.
- A full featured grade book application with export capabilities
- An attendance application
- A lesson planner which will automatically post assignments to edmodo when the date comes up
- A simple group page where persistent resources and information can be stored
- A quiz/testing applicication
We also want to release a version of Edmodo that individual schools and districts can purchase to integrate with their existing IT infrastructure.
Edmodo Goals for 2009-2010 school year
- release Edmodo 3.0
- release premium features
- release a version schools can run on their own servers
- release a web based mobile version
- release a native iPhone application
Edmodo outage – restored from backup
Edmodo hit a little rough patch this morning and we had to restore from last nights backup which was done about 5:00am CST 5-15-2009.
Here is what happened. We have two versions of Edmodo, one that everyone uses and one that is purely for development, but unfortunately they were sharing the same production database. Essentially our development version used the same database as our production version. We made some changes to the code on the development version that was bad and it automatically started deleting all the posts in Edmodo. Can you hear the panic set in? We ended up having to restore from last nights which, which finished restoring about 12:20pm this afternoon.
We are truly sorry to any new users and existing users that either signed up or posted anything between 5:00am CST and 12:20pm on CST 5-15-2009.
This has definitely a learning experience for us and we are taking measures to keep this from happening again.
- We have already moved our development site off our production database to prevent this from ocuring in the future.
- We will be looking at ways to be able to recover from a more recent time than a nightly backup.
EdTech Podcast #5 Released
The EdTech Podcast just released Episode #5 where Chris & Matt interview myself (Jeff O’Hara) and we talk about Edmodo, the new Amazon Kindle, and other topics related to education technology.
The EdTech podcast is very new as you can see by this only being their fifth episode, but it is quickly shaping up to be a must listen for any education technology enthusiast.
Edmodo gets nod in 2009 Horizon Report K-12 Edition
I just wanted to share with the Edmodo Community that we got mentioned in the 2009 Horizon Report K-12 Edition that was released earlier this month. We also received a mention in the eSchool news article “Six technologies soon to affect education” based on our mention in the Horizon report. Unfortunately to see our blurb on page 2 you have to register for free 
I’ve quoted the paragraph where we are mentioned for people that do not want to register with eSchoolnews.com.
Tools mentioned in the report include Twitter, Skype, and Edmodo, a private micro-blogging platform that gives teachers and students a sheltered place to manage classroom assignments and activities as well as engage in protected conversations.
2009 Horizon Report K-12 Edition.
Each edition of the Horizon Report is released with a Creative Commons License and may be freely replicated and distributed for noncommercial purposes provided that each is distributed only in its entirety.
Introducing Edmodo 2.0
For the last few months we have been hard at work on version 2.0 of Edmodo and we would now like to share it with you.
Notable new features visible to users
- Redesigned Home Page
- Tagging of all posts
- Locker has been removed in favor of tagging, all previous posts will be moved to a locker tag soon.
- Wider Time-line to support a wider range of embeddable content
- Grades tab
- View a list of all grades received for a given group
- New Default Avatar set
- Notificiations
- via twitter (user must follow @edmodonotify)
- via text message, users select cell phone provider and enter phone number
- Viewing of the following file formats within Edmodo using Scribd’s iPaper technology
- Microsoft Word Files doc, docx
- Microsoft Powerpoint Files ppt, pptx, pps
- Microsoft Excel Files xls, xlsx
- PDF: PDF pdf, ps
- Open Office: Open Office Documents odt, odp, sxw, sxi, etc.
- Plain Text: Text Documents txt, rtf
- Ability to add RSS feeds to a group
- Inline viewing of youtube, google video, flickr, slideshare, wikipedia, if posted as a link
- Ability for a teacher to return a file when assigning a grade to an assignment
Facebook is starting to look a lot like Edmodo
It’s a little interesting how the upcoming new Facebook homepage looks a lot like Edmodo. Makes us think we are moving in the right direction with Edmodo.
Creative Commons in Education & the Classroom
I often get asked about what type of content is legal to use on School & Teacher’s websites. I explain that it is not ok to use copyrighted material that other people own on their websites. I try to explain to them what Creative Commons (CC) is and why they should think about using CC content and why they should think about licensing their content they post on the web with a Creative Commons license. At Edmodo we are big fans of creative commons licenses and license all our content under a Creative Commons License.
Enter Creative Commons:
“Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.” Wikipedia
Hopefully the following video and document will help explain to you what Creative Commons is why you should use and license the works you create on the web with a Creative Commons License.
creativecommons-sharing-creative-works_eng
Using & creating Creative Commons Licensed material in the classroom will allow you and your students to use, remix, share, and ultimately learn from using and publishing other Creative Commons content.
Resources:
http://creativecommons.org/
Search for Creative Commons Licensed Work
License Your work under Creative Commons
Wikipedia Article
How-To change your Edmodo Group code
Up until now, if any of your codes for your Edmodo groups got out, you couldn’t do much short of contacting us and manually changing the code for your group. Now you can change the group code you hand out to students yourself. You can use this to lock out any new group members once all your group members have signed up or if the code should happen to be leaked to people that shouldn’t have access to your group.
To reset a group invite code, just go to the pencil icon next to the group.
Next, select “Code & Info”.
Now, click the “Reset Code” link.
You will see that your code has now been changed and you can now exit using the “X” in the upper right hand corner of the box.
If anyone has anymore questions about this feature, do not hesitate to contact us by either leaving a comment on this post, using our contact form, or posting to the Edmodo group.
Edmodo Video Presentation
A great online presentation of Edmodo on Dim Dim explaining how to use Edmodo. It is hard to see, but there is a full screen button in the lower right hand corner of the video.
Created by Jennifer and Leanne, student teachers in the Secondary MAC Program at the University of Michigan School of Education
You can now search within Edmodo
One of the critical features missing from Edmodo was the ability to search your posts. We can finally say that this has been corrected as the search feature was rolled out quietly last week. Search works based on which group’s posts you are viewing at the time of the search. If you’re viewing the “everything” timeline, then the search will occur across all of your groups and direct messages. The search is pretty simple, it will either match an exact phrase, exact word, or even part of a word within your posts. When your done searching, click the “Clear Search” link.
The search box after a search has been done. Note the “clear search” link.
Feel free to leave any questions you have about this feature in the comments.
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Edmodo is a private micro-blogging platform built for use by teachers and students.
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