Edmodo for Parents - An App Just for Parents

Edmodo provides a good platform for sharing resources with students, hosting conversations, sending reminders, and creating content through third-party apps. The Edmodo mobile apps enable teachers to manage content on the go and allow students to quickly check for new content from their teachers.

Edmodo for Parents is an app designed just for parents. The app, available for iOS and Android, allows parents to quickly check for announcements from teachers. Perhaps more importantly the app offers a student activity feed. The student activity feed shows parents which assignments their children have completed. It also shows lists of upcoming and overdue assignments, quizzes, and events.

How to Find Creative Commons Images Within Edmodo

As I shared last week, Photos for Class is now available as an Edmodo app. With Photos for Class installed in your Edmodo group your students can search for Creative Commons licensed images and download them with citations attached to them. In the video embedded below I provide a demonstration of how to install Photos for Class. The second half of the video demonstrates a students' perspective of using Photos for Class within Edmodo.


Disclosure: Photos for Class is owned by Storyboard That. Storyboard That is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com

Find and Cite Creative Commons Images in Edmodo

Photos for Class is a free Creative Commons image search engine that was launched in late November. The service is designed to help students find and accurately cite images. Images downloaded through Photos for Class have proper attributions automatically added to them. This service is now available in Edmodo too.

Photos for Class can be found in the Edmodo app store. The app is free. You can install Photos for Class Edmodo app with just a couple of clicks. Once installed all of your students can start searching for and downloading Creative Commons licensed images.

Applications for Education
I always advocate for students to use their own pictures or public domain pictures in their projects. For those times when appropriate public domain images cannot be found and taking their own pictures isn't practical, a search for Creative Commons-licensed images through a tool like Photos for Class is a good tool for students to use.

Disclosure: Photos for Class is owned by Storyboard That. Storyboard That is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com

7 Free Edmodo Apps to Try This Year

As I do every year, I am taking this week to relax, recharge, and ski with friends. While I'm away I will be re-running the most popular posts of the year. This was the second most popular post in July, 2014.

The integration of third party services is one of the things that makes Edmodo a good system for organizing and sharing content with students. The single log-in aspect of Edmodo gives your students access to excellent tools without having to keep track of separate user names and passwords. Whether you're thinking about using Edmodo in the new school year or you're simply looking for new apps to try, take a look at the following seven free Edmodo apps.

eduCanon is a free service for creating, assigning, and tracking your students' progress on flipped lessons. eduCanon allows teachers to build flipped lessons using YouTube and Vimeo videos, create questions about the videos, then assign lessons to their students. Teachers can track the progress of their students within eduCanon. To create lessons start by identifying a topic and objective then searching YouTube and Vimeo from within the eduCanon site. Once you've found a suitable video you can build multiple choice questions throughout the timeline of your chosen video.

ClassCharts is an excellent tool for creating online seating charts, behavior charts, and behavior reports. ClassCharts allows you to create online seating charts for each of your classes. Through those seating charts you can record attendance, give virtual kudos to students, and record negative and positive behaviors. The information that you record in ClassCharts can be shared with parents and students through special log-ins that you supply to them. ClassCharts offers a couple of features that I really like. These features make it different from other online behavior chart services. The first feature that stands-out to me is the option to upload pictures of students to your seating charts instead of just relying on cartoon avatars. The second feature that I love is the option to invite other teachers to collaborate on the tracking of student behaviors.

Subtext is an app that you can use to create online book discussions tied directly to the text of a book. The list of the things that you can do with Subtext is quite impressive, but the basic purpose is to provide a place for teachers and students to have digital book discussion. These are some of the many things that you can do with Subtext: using Subtext you can read ebooks, annotate ebooks, create quizzes about ebooks, and write blog posts about the ebooks you read. You can create private and public book discussion groups and build bookshelves for your groups.

CodeMonkey is a simple app designed to help students learn some basic coding principles. The app presents students with a series of challenges in which they have to help a monkey reach his bananas. Students help the monkey get his bananas by correctly programming the movements of the monkey.


CK-12 Science and Math Edmodo apps make it easy to find quality practice problems for your students. You can assign the practice problems to your students through Edmodo. Students scores on the practice assessments can be saved to your Edmodo gradebook.


eduClipper is a bookmarking and digital portfolio tool for teachers and students. Teachers can now use eduClipper to create assignment portfolios. Assignment portfolios allow you to assign projects or tasks to students. You can assign a start and end date for each project. Within the assignment portfolio you can include a project / task description, links to materials, and project files such as rubrics that you either upload as PDFs or insert from Google Drive. Students submit their completed assignments through the portfolio where you can then offer feedback in the forms of text, audio, or video comments.

Disclosure: I have a small advisory role with eduClipper and a very small equity stake in it.

CodeMonkey - A Fun Programming Environment for Kids

Earlier this week in my post about seven free Edmodo apps to try this summer I mentioned CodeMonkey. CodeMonkey is worth mentioning again because it is available as a stand-alone website for students and teachers that do not use Edmodo.

CodeMonkey is a fun game through which students learn some basic programming skills. In the game students have to help a monkey get his bananas. The game presents students with a series of thirty progressively more difficult challenges in which they have to help a monkey reach his bananas. Students help the monkey get his bananas by correctly programming the movements of the monkey. CodeMonkey provides little tutorials for to help students through the challenges.

See CodeMonkey in action in the video below.


Applications for Education
Playing CodeMonkey alone isn't going to turn students into programmers, but it could definitely inspire them to explore other programming options.

7 Free Edmodo Apps to Try This Summer

The integration of third party services is one of the things that makes Edmodo a good system for organizing and sharing content with students. The single log-in aspect of Edmodo gives your students access to excellent tools without having to keep track of separate user names and passwords. Whether you're thinking about using Edmodo in the new school year or you're simply looking for new apps to try, take a look at the following seven free Edmodo apps.

eduCanon is a free service for creating, assigning, and tracking your students' progress on flipped lessons. eduCanon allows teachers to build flipped lessons using YouTube and Vimeo videos, create questions about the videos, then assign lessons to their students. Teachers can track the progress of their students within eduCanon. To create lessons start by identifying a topic and objective then searching YouTube and Vimeo from within the eduCanon site. Once you've found a suitable video you can build multiple choice questions throughout the timeline of your chosen video.

ClassCharts is an excellent tool for creating online seating charts, behavior charts, and behavior reports. ClassCharts allows you to create online seating charts for each of your classes. Through those seating charts you can record attendance, give virtual kudos to students, and record negative and positive behaviors. The information that you record in ClassCharts can be shared with parents and students through special log-ins that you supply to them. ClassCharts offers a couple of features that I really like. These features make it different from other online behavior chart services. The first feature that stands-out to me is the option to upload pictures of students to your seating charts instead of just relying on cartoon avatars. The second feature that I love is the option to invite other teachers to collaborate on the tracking of student behaviors.

Subtext is an app that you can use to create online book discussions tied directly to the text of a book. The list of the things that you can do with Subtext is quite impressive, but the basic purpose is to provide a place for teachers and students to have digital book discussion. These are some of the many things that you can do with Subtext: using Subtext you can read ebooks, annotate ebooks, create quizzes about ebooks, and write blog posts about the ebooks you read. You can create private and public book discussion groups and build bookshelves for your groups.

CodeMonkey is a simple app designed to help students learn some basic coding principles. The app presents students with a series of challenges in which they have to help a monkey reach his bananas. Students help the monkey get his bananas by correctly programming the movements of the monkey.


CK-12 Science and Math Edmodo apps make it easy to find quality practice problems for your students. You can assign the practice problems to your students through Edmodo. Students scores on the practice assessments can be saved to your Edmodo gradebook.


eduClipper is a bookmarking and digital portfolio tool for teachers and students. Teachers can now use eduClipper to create assignment portfolios. Assignment portfolios allow you to assign projects or tasks to students. You can assign a start and end date for each project. Within the assignment portfolio you can include a project / task description, links to materials, and project files such as rubrics that you either upload as PDFs or insert from Google Drive. Students submit their completed assignments through the portfolio where you can then offer feedback in the forms of text, audio, or video comments.

Disclosure: I have a small advisory role with eduClipper and a very small equity stake in it.

Locate & Distribute CCSS-Aligned Practice Quizzes With CK-12 Edmodo Apps

CK-12, the producers of the Flexbook tool for creating online textbooks, offers Edmodo apps for locating and distributing Common Core-aligned math and science practice quizzes. The CK-12 Math Edmodo app and the CK-12 Science Edmodo app provide libraries of quizzes that cover middle and high school science and mathematics concepts. Practice quizzes are posted as assignments and your students' scores automatically show up in your Edmodo Gradebook.



Applications for Education
The CK-12 Edmodo apps could be useful for quickly locating practice assessments to distribute to your students as prior knowledge check before embarking on a new series of lessons.

Listen Edition Offers an Edmodo App for Teaching With Current Events

Listen Edition is a service that organizes current events lessons around public radio stories. Now these stories and lessons are available through the Listen Edition Edmodo app. Each story is accompanied by a list of vocabulary words for students and a pre-made Socrative quiz.

Applications for Education
Short audio recordings an make the news and other stories accessible to more students. Listen Edition allows your students to listen to the stories multiple times before answering the Socrative questions. Socrative offers good tools for seeing how your students are responding to questions online.

How to Add Free Apps to Your Edmodo Group

I recently received an email from a someone who has just started to explore possibly using Edmodo with her students next fall. One of the aspects of Edmodo that she found appealing is the option to add apps that her students can access through their Edmodo accounts. That's one of the features of Edmodo that I like too because I'm a big fan of not requiring students to keep track of a different user name and password for every online app I want them to use.

Adding free apps to your Edmodo group is a simple process. The screenshots below will walk you through the steps. (Click the images to view them in full size).

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Now You Can Add eduClipper to Edmodo

eduClipper, the social bookmarking service that I said teachers want Pinterest to be, can now be added to your Edmodo account and those of your students. The new eduClipper app for Edmodo lets you install eduClipper for all your students with the click of a button. Students can create content and share it with their peers and you.

One of the things that makes eduClipper an excellent social bookmarking tool for students and teachers is the number of controls that teachers have over their students' accounts. Teachers can specify who students can share with and specify who can read their students bookmarks. These excellent settings are still in place in the eduClipper for Edmodo app.