- You can post your sub plans in Edmodo. I get pulled out of class at times for committee meetings or to work with our reading consultant, and this month I am presenting at several conferences. In the past, I had to write out a step-by step plan for my sub for what students needed to do and hope and pray and keep my fingers crossed that everything would turn out OK. Well, with Edmodo, that's no longer an issue--I now post what the kids are to do on days I'm gone right in Edmodo. This way, every student has a copy of what they are supposed to do when class starts. I do leave a printed copy for the sub so they know what the students are supposed to be doing on their netbooks, and the students are directed to check Edmodo for what they'll be doing on the board. This way I know that every student knows what I said in my plans (I used to hear this a lot: "Oh, the sub didn't tell us that!"). And, if there are any questions about what I mean in my plans, then...
- Students can always direct post (private message) me in Edmodo with any questions when I'm not there. This is now a standing rule for students in my room--if I'm ever gone, they know they can direct post me in Edmodo at the very moment after the question pops into their brains. I do warn them that I might not answer right away, but I will get back to them as soon as teacherly possible. I currently have Edmodo notify me via text message any time someone direct posts me, so I usually receive the messages quickly because my phone is constantly on or near my person at all times. My students take prodigious advantage of this direct posting option when I'm gone, and they say it's nice that they can still ask me something even if I'm not physically present in the classroom. But it's not just questions they always ask; sometimes.....
- They can tell me when things are going horribly awry when I'm not there. For example, my lunch hour was switched right before school started to avoid me having to teach many many periods in a row without a break. However, someone failed to change it on the master schedule handed out to subs--and my 4th period (when all lunches occur) did not have a sub for about 20 minutes the last time I was not in class. They told me this in Edmodo, and I immediately called the right people and got the situation resolved. Another example is when I totally forget to put the progress check they're supposed be taking online for them in Juno--they sure do direct post me by the dozen telling me it's not online when that happens. But, these are things I need to know, and it allows me to fix it (and tell them it's fixed by posting the entire class using the Edmodo app on my iPhone) promptly. It also saves me a ton of frustration and teacher anguish by not having to walk in the next day, find out what happened, and then have to plan off the cuff.
When I wrote this previous post extolling the many virtues of Edmodo, I was still a relatively new user. Now that I have a tad more experience, Edmodo has continued to knock my educational socks off with what it can do--but it has really impressed me with it's capable of doing when I'm not even in my classroom. Here are a few more uses I've found for Edmodo that are keeping me madly and deeply in love with it, all revolving around using it on days when I have a substitute teacher:
Nancy
3/19/2012 12:12:36 am
If I'm reading this right, then you have computers in the classroom for most, if not all students?
Terie
3/19/2012 09:55:22 am
Nancy: Comments are closed.
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I'm a K-12 Curriculum Director who loves to put things in parentheses (like this) and overuse hyphens--like this. I also abuse semicolons with wild abandon; I just can't help it. Crazy Teaching: Just Doing What Makes Sense by Terie Engelbrecht is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Archives
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