Edmodo
Edmodo is a great way to take classroom material and put it into an environment that students understand and will be excited to be a part of. Teacher's can upload material, start class discussions and even interact with other classrooms in other locations. The facebook type layout will make it very appealing to students and have an almost no learning curve for most. Edmodo provides teachers with tools such as grade books, quizzes and apps to boost their lesson plans and classroom materials. The one think I didn't like about Edmodo was the app store. Being very tech savvy myself, I found it hard to buy and install apps. I had to look in several places to find and actually install the apps. I think when you are working with teachers you need to be a little more user friendly.
I did however find that the news feed was helpful. I was able to read what a few Instructional Technologists were doing and I liked looking at their ideas and progress on integrating technology into the classroom. This was my first time to experience Edmodo because I haven't had the need to use it. My school is very blessed to have a website that includes all these social networking traits. We have 2 great website developers that have provided us with grade books, assignment pages and submissions, portfolios, forums, email, and anything else you can think of that's needed for the classroom.
Classroom 2.0
Classroom 2.0 is a great site for many Web 2.0 ideas and collaboration. They do require you to fill out a long form and wait for approval for membership. Since I’d never used this site, I decided to sign up. After hours of waiting for approval, I gave up a explored the site and a visitor. I found many links at the top useful and possible things I could share with teachers to use in the classroom. I did think that the links would be a part of the site but most of them go to different websites and I felt a bit overwhelmed. I did find their forum to be very cumbersome and I felt it was unorganized. I do think if they had categories within the forum to give it a bit more organization it would flow better. I don’t know what teacher has that much time to scroll through 900 pages of forum threads. I did a search within the forum and found much of the information to be old and out of date. I don’t think this would be something I would use.