Edmodo (discontinued) vs. Infinite Campus

I find Edmodo to be especially suited to secondary school. It is a great way to accommodate the busy schedules of teens who are often working their first jobs or attending sports and have limited time for homework, but can benefit from looking up assignments or receiving reminders on their phones. It also prepares them for college in that it resembles many collegiate LMS systems

Incentivized

As a classroom teacher, I love not having to rely on just a handwritten grade book anymore. When I input grades, I can print the updated grade book whenever I choose. This keeps my workload down since I don't have to write it in the grade book and then put it on the computer.

Incentivized

• Edmodo is an excellent communication tool. Its Facebook style of posts makes it a familiar environment for teachers to communicate what's happening in class with both students and parents.
• Edmodo's ability to submit and grade assignments online is easy to use and very similar to some other popular LMS platforms. Assignment collection is straightforward and the digital grading tools are simple and effective.
• Edmodo makes it extremely easy to get both students and parents into the the LMS system. Edmodo also has an easy to use subgrouping feature as well, allowing teachers to divide individual classrooms into smaller groups for particular assignments.
• Edmodo's online testing feature is fairly easy to use. I have found this a useful feature for both informal and formal assessment of students.
• Edmodo's polling feature is simple and effective. There are many uses for polling both in and out of the classroom.
• Edmodo's messaging feature is a nice way to communicate between student and teacher or parent and teacher.
• Edmodo's app (Android or iOS), although not as feature rich as the website, works well with many of the features already listed above.
• Edmodo has a very nice Calendar feature, allowing the teacher to easily post important information and/or due dates of assignments.
• Edmodo makes it easy to share folders, either with the public or with your classes.
• Edmodo, like many other popular LMS platforms, integrates nicely with Google Drive.
• Edmodo has a great many community forums. This really is an amazing feature of their LMS. It is so very easy to connect with other teachers and bounce ideas off of each other.

Incentivized

• It is very clean (not cluttered with information and buttons)
• It keeps all personal information in one spot
• The message center is helpful, and it is easy to see when there is a new message
• The breakdown of attendance is done very well

Incentivized

• Google Classroom is more stream lined, offers students the same functions as Edmodo, and is preferred among majority of students.
• Students are often locked out of their classrooms after 14 days, forget passwords, and have trouble finding class folders.
• Edmodo's platform has been relatively unchanged for the past several years and students seem to want to try newer applications and technologies.

Incentivized

• Infinite Campus does not integrate seamlessly with our learning management system. This is a big deal in that using Infinite Campus means our faculty and staff are asked to do more (fatigue) and there is more room for error to occur.
• Infinite Campus' platform is not visually appealing nor does the site design use enough colors and distinction to clearly convey progress to a user.

Incentivized

Edmodo is a LEARNING tool. Not "one more thing" I have to use or integrate. It was my one stop shop for everything for my classes. More importantly, I was able to watch my students grow. My students who were timid, and quiet, became my discussion leaders. Students who didn't do their homework, never missed an assignment once I started doing "e-tickets" and discussion groups. Everyone felt they had a voice, which made our classroom community that much stronger.

If used for its intended purpose, Edmodo is a great service. It's free, meaning teachers can actually afford it. Plus, it offers a lot of tools that make communicating with students and parents simple and painless, in addition to allowing basic assignments and quizzes. It's totally easy to learn, making it less intimidating to teachers who don't have a lot of time and who may not be completely comfortable with technology.

If there is an issue, concern, suggestion, or question, Edmodo support is helpful and willing to listen. Many Edmodians are former teachers and have a sense of how classrooms work. This is crucial when building a platform to use in education. Edmodo does an excellent job of staying connected and collaborating with teachers.

Incentivized

I haven't reached out to Infinite Campus for technical support. We have in-school people who are trained to help us out in the event of a problem. We have had a couple of times where the system has gone down unexpectedly, but our school IT professionals were able to sort it out.

Incentivized

Plan a little extra time to let them play with the platform with fun assignments. This made them comfortable submitting work, finding items, communicating with me or each other

When I first decide to think about changing our teaching method from traditionary to modern, online method, Google Classroom seems to the best one, because it is from Google, and everyone knows Google is the best, I lost so much time to receive the access for Google Classroom. So I researched about other online classroom platforms and when I found Edmodo, I gave it a try. And I can say that now, it's a good experience and I love It.

Incentivized

I find these other products to be much more simplified in their set up and user friendly where with Infinite Campus, it requires a good amount of time and patience to acclimate to the set up and arrangement of content. Also, the other products I have reviewed are more appealing to the eye with their color content/contrast, background themes/colors and engaging colors which make the experience enjoyable and calming.

Incentivized

• Definitely better customer service! Once the parents figured out the tool and students were proficient with it. It was an excellent way to communicate student's strengths and weaknesses in their learning.
• Increased employee efficiency. Especially since teachers can share assignments easily too. And, as I've referred to many times, the grading feature is a huge time saver!
• A negative impact is we have had some cyberbulling. But, used the blocking features and handled it with face-to-face interaction with the students in question and their families.

Incentivized

• Positive impact: Allows us to keep our pacing guides up to date for weekly meetings and information dissemination.
• Positive impact: Allows us to provide our counselors, students, and parents with informative progress reports in a timely manner.
• Negative impact: Takes more time away from our other duties when it takes so long to find the data/information I'm looking for amongst all the classes I need to go through just to get to the one I need. They really should look at a better way to arrange/group the drop down menu for the classes.

Incentivized