With blended learning came the necessity of different tools for collaboration, storage, assigning, and presenting. A post in District Administration lists several of the current Social Learning Networks available to schools/teachers for free or minimal cost ($20/yr.). Those are Edmodo, Gaggle, Ning, Blackboard, ePals, and Schoolology. I am only featuring Edmodo, My Big Campus (free with LightSpeed), Google Classroom, and Promethean's new Classflow in this article. Our Chromebooks group also uses Echo as its platform, but this is a subscription site.
First, Edmodo since I have used this one for some time. This site is very Facebook-like. It offers at newer tool, Snapshot which allows you to use provided content aligned to Common Core standards. Other resources include apps that run within Edmodo. Teachers can past notes, assignments, quizzes, and polls with attached files or links. There is a gradebook available and quizzes are graded except for short answer questions. Students have storage (backpack) and can belong to multiple classes. They can post notes to the class, take quizzes/polls, and turn in assignments from any location with internet.
Our security filter LightSpeed provides a site which is very similar, My Big Campus. I have used this experimentally, but have not led a class in the system. One difference to Edmodo is that it cannot be used as a stand-alone for one teacher without information from IT within their district.
Google Classroom uses Apps for Education This is a relatively new feature in Google’s ever-growing empire. Chrome Apps for Education is a part of this LMS and an administrator must provide domain information in order to use it. We have provided training on both Chrome apps and extensions, but due to a lack of domain I can only give you what they present without personal insights. Connected resources are YouTube, Flickr, Google Maps, and Drive’s suite of cloud software, In Drive teachers have the ability to automatically make a copy of a Google Document for each student. It also creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student to help keep everyone organized.An im provement over Edmodo is that students can keep track of what's due on an Assignments page and begin working with just a click. Most other features are offered by the other products. According to their Mobile information says that caching allows students to access assignments without an internet connection.
Promethean Classflow is not just an online replacement for Activ software. It has many features which were available in that platform, but is now device agnostic in student response devices. It offers the data feedback for the teacher it always has. And says that collaboration inside and outside of class is possible. One thing mentioned here and not other places is leveling and differentiation of what individual students view during a lesson. Students join using a code provided by the teacher. Their site says it can be integrated with your district’s SIS, LMS, or CMS system so they are not technically a LMS
