Sharing ideas and resources among the teachers in my staff room isn’t as good as it could be, I’ll be honest, but it does happen. Some teachers, like me, also share ideas and resources online, using forums or Twitter, for example.

However, we all know from experience that, often, the solution to a problem comes from looking at it from a completely different perspective and that going round the same problem in circles achieves no purpose.

With this in mind, having often wondered what would happen if, instead of asking fellow teachers for ideas and resources, we asked our pupils how they would like to be taught, I decided that I should stop wondering and ask them what they thought of using Edmodo for the first time this year. Above is what they had to say.

Edmodo, a micro-blogging platform for teachers and students, is often described as “what Twitter would be like if it had been designed by a teacher”. I think there is more to it than that, I think Edmodo, with its clean design and its spot-on educational oriented functionality, is what Twitter would be like if it had been designed by students for students.

Edmodo continues to upgrade and improve itself periodically (now in version 3.0 and with an iPhone/iPod Touch app in the pipeline) and it continues to impress me and my students and has, almost single handedly, helped me achieve last year’s objective of improving communication with my students.

Its success has been such that I am left wondering, do we need an institutional VLE at all when we can use tools or combinations of tools like Edmodo to provide my students with personalised web-based teaching and learning opportunities?

What do you think? Your thoughts are, as ever, very welcome.

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