Edmodo

The next phase of my first year in technology is underway. I had one more fifth grade class to find pen pals for outside of the adopt a soldier program. On the Elementary Tech Teachers website I connected with a fellow teacher back East and we were discussing ways to get our students to communicate through technology. She found the Edmodo site and we both liked it so much we decided to use it for the pen-pal's. I also decided for my students in grades 3 through 5. I can post assignments keep track of who turns in assignments, give grades right on the site (yes this gives me two places to put grades, but the students always know how they performed), I can also post links, documents, and other things the students will need to complete their assignment all in one place. After spending the week getting my students signed up and logged in I think this is going to be a great virtual classroom. The students are excited about it because the layout is some what similar to Facebook so they are already familiar and it gives them even more readily available access to the computers.
I went to a technology meeting on Tuesday and found out that our pilot programs for notebooks (iPads) in the classroom will be using Edmodo also. I was even more excited that my students will be a little ahead of the learning curve. By the time the pilot begins using Edmodo we will have already been using it for several months in the classroom and if the pilot goes well the third graders who would get to use the notebooks as fourth graders will be ready for the virtual classroom environment.