Lets do a quick overview of how easy it is to add a poll.  First click the “more”  link in the Edmodo post bubble.  Next, select Poll and the post should look like the following screen shot.  You type your question, and at least 2 answers.  If you need more answers, just click the “add answers” button.

This is what a poll will look like to your student.  Each student can only vote once and they can not retract their vote.

Once you start getting some responses from your students you can quickly gauge student sentiment regarding the question you posted.

Clicking the update link will refresh the polls stats for you.

What do you think of Edmodo Polls?  We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Now what are you waiting for, login to Edmodo and try out the poll feature

• A blend of Social Networking and Online Classes
• Simplicity for Teachers
• Relevance for teaching and learning

Now have a look at the full presentation slides.

We’d love to share more of your Edmodo experiences with the Edmodo community. If you’ve created an Edmodo presentation, Edmodo documentation, or have an Edmodo success story you would like to share with the rest of  the community, send us a quick note by clicking the contact form above.

Old Filter

New Filter

We think this change solves a pretty important problem for Edmodo users.  Even though it’s small, we think it is going to have a big impact on how you and your students use Edmodo.  Tell us what you think in the comments area here or on Edmodo in the Edmodo group.

My class would be nicely described as ‘that’ class – I’m sure you know what I mean. The general hobbies of the students outside school largely revolve around farm-life, motorbike racing, rugby league, and pig-hunting (yes, grade 5). Any use of the computer at home is generalised to gaming, surfing the web and chatting.

Edmodo has had a dramatic effect on my class – with an interface that mirrors the best Web 2.0 has to offer – it has captured the imaginations of my kids and driven them further to succeed in their work.

A case in point

A particular student of mine (that we shall call Fred) is the type of boy who survives on Coka-Cola, chips and his X-box. In grade 5 he has seen every horror film imaginable, knows far too much for his age, has no inner-monologue, is completely hyperactive but dislikes sport, plays his X-box for hours before school and long into the night, and just does not ‘get’ school – I love him – he’s great. Fred isn’t particularly naughty nor does he lack intelligence. He’s just got too much outside school to appreciate what is in school – it’s a waste of his time.

English is a particular headache for Fred as he is a decent speller and can read and write – ‘so why do I need anything else?’ This began to change a little bit last year when I started to integrate computer games into literacy but Fred had still never handed in an assignment or a single piece of homework in the 6 months I’d taught this class… until last Friday.

On Friday we started looking at alliteration and alliterative sentences/poems. In class we covered the classics ‘Sam the slippery snake slipped and slid across the slimy swamp’ and paid attention to alliteration in The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. Towards the end of the lesson I was asking the students to think of their own alliterative poems and to give them some thought over the weekend (I never set weekend homework)

The bell rang, class dismissed – teachers race each other to the staffroom for a frosty beverage – another week done.

I opened my laptop mid-drink to check some emails, read some blogs, update Twitter and while I was there – have a play with Edmodo. This is what I saw… at 3:30 on a Friday…

Now I know he didn’t quite get the point and it’s not truly alliterative but let me reiterate – Fred has NEVER handed in a piece of homework, Fred does not ‘do’ school, Fred does not get supported outside school to complete work… Fred sat next to his X-box and instead of killing bad-guys he signed onto Edmodo, wrote me 4 poems that I didn’t ask for and then spent the next hour or so chatting to his classmates online about what we had done in school that week. They left encouraging messages in reply to his post and I sat there open-mouthed at how good I knew that would make him feel… all thanks to Edmodo.

]]> http://www.edmodo.com/blog/2009/08/03/edmodo-store/feed/ 0 http://www.edmodo.com/blog/2009/08/03/edmodo-store/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/edmodoblog/~3/N1D-tl_lIqY/ http://www.edmodo.com/blog/2009/08/02/edmodo-3-0-feature-highlights/#comments Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:40:26 +0000 admin http://www.edmodo.com/blog/?p=356 Notable Edmodo 3.0 features

• Realtime updates – Edmodo time-line auto-refreshes
• Threaded replies, replies are now underneath each post instead of sent to the top of the timeline and treated like a new post.
• New caching system – Speed when clicking items is now super fast
• Archive feature – ability for teachers to archive their groups forever.
• Inline editing of posts and replies -we don’t send you to a separate page to edit your posts and replies now.
• Spotlight feature – when someone replies to one of your posts, when you post an assignment or when a student turns in an assignment they get highlighted in the spotlight area.  This should be the first thing you check when you login to Edmodo from now on.
• See all posts by user by clicking their picture or name.

Items currently disabled in Edmodo 3.0

• Notifications are currently disabled -  Update: turned back on Aug 2nd at 2:04pm CST time
• Importing of RSS feeds  – Currently Disabled
• Group Deletion – we have to rewrite the group deletion codes. as things are much more complex  due to our cacheing system.  No time-frame yet on when this will be back.

Make sure you check out The Edmodo Documentation Wiki for detailed instructions of Edmodo features.

The Edmodo Team

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

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.

1. We have already moved our development site off our production database to prevent this from ocuring in the future.
2. We will be looking at ways to be able to recover from a more recent time than a nightly backup.