It’s been a busy month. The new role is bringing great opportunities for collaboration, communication and consumption of caffeine! However I’ve been neglecting my blog a bit – ok a lot – and felt that tonight was as good a night as any to post an update!
Today was a successful day for sharing the opportunities Edmodo offers both individual teachers and departments. I was lucky enough to be invited to spend time with colleagues from the drama department and offer input on how they could make more effective use of ICT in their learning and teaching. It was an interesting scenario: 1 teacher PC and a course that could make great use of multimedia to enhance an individual’s learning experience. A network folder for pupils seemed a daft idea as students could not access it at the point of learning and would have to find a computer during break or lunch to copy files to a USB drive if they wanted to revise lessons at home. Edmodo offered access to pupils via their smartphone, unlimited storage space for files, anywhere access and a means of communication with their subject teacher and classmates. Flipped classroom possibilities were also discussed and I’m really excited to see what the drama department can do with its features.
At the end of the day I also ran a short 1:1 training session in setting up and using Edmodo and discussions during the training spurred me on to create a series of short videos. I use AVS4U to record and edit these videos and, so far, have found this package £43 extremely well spent! There are a great number of tutorial videos available on YouTube if you want to see what you can do before splashing the cash.
The video below quickly shows how to set up an RSS feed in an Edmodo group. Hopefully it is clear enough to understand although I think on reflection that I’ll up the screen capture quality to allow me to use the Ken Burns effect to pick out detailed parts of the user interface. Comments are welcome, by the way!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh01aQlQgb8]
The weekend is going to be busy. I want to make a weekly video for my Higher Computing class to experiment flipping their classroom and focussing on improving their application of knowledge rather than the lecture-style delivery.
