Pownce X Edmodo

I´ve already written about Pownce and how I loved the possibility of easily sharing files with a group of people but after I got the message that Pownce would be closing I decided to give http://edmodo.com a try. Carla Arena was the first one who talked to me about it as she used it with a group of teachers during a course.

These are some of the features which I found in common with Pownce and some differences as well.
*Both in pownce and edmodo you can easily share files (pictures, songs, videos, links, documents) with a group of people or with an individual. An advantage edmodo has is the possibility to share any application which has an embed code, like the examples below.















sharing a slide show sharing a video sharing a voicethread



*Both offer you the possibility of creating groups to aggregate the people you want to share with. If you are the creator of the group (instructor) you get a code you give to the people you invite to join the group. The code feature makes edmodo much safer than Pownce, in the sense that you have the control with whom your students will be in contact with. As the manager of the group you also have the power to select the messages you find adequate for the group (clicking in public). Another positive point is the possiblility of filtering the incoming messages by groups or reading all the messages together. Something I miss in edmodo is the possibility of filtering the messages per person by just clicking on their picture as I could do in Pownce.


Great advantages for using edmodo with students:
- you can have a quick channel of communication with your students.
- language students will have plenty of writing and reading practise using the tool.
- you can send assignments to the group and grade them.
- you can send alerts.
- you can share a course calendar with the group.
- you can put your students in contact with other groups to develop joint projects.

Another thing I miss in edmodo is the impossibility to customize my layout, but nothing is perfect, right? I´ll definitely use edmodo with my groups next term.

This is a tutorial Carla Arena has made about edmodo

TUTORIAL

Screencast tutorial about POWNCE

This is my second post about POWNCE.COM and this time as I´m planning to have partners from other countries join my groups in Pownce I decided to make a screencast tutorial in order to help my partners and their students use this wonderful microblogging tool.
Click on PLAY on the player below or to see it fullscreen with the mouse movement click on the link below that.

POWNCE experience - microblogging with Beginners

I´d like to share a project Camila Sousa and I have started with our Basic 1 students. As you all know, basic 1 students know nearly nothing and can hardly communicate in English. After a month of classes, we set up a Pownce account and helped each of our sts to do the same. It´s supposed to be a closed group where students communicate with their classmates and their teacher.

Each week, they´re supposed to follow a writing task after having received a model from their teacher. Our objective is to have sts start writing in English for real communication since the beginning of the course, starting off with very simple texts and hopefully by the end of the semester they´ll be writing more complex ones. We´ve discovered that students are more open to using internet for learning English when it is proposed at the beginning of the course, the enthusiasm is super. The picture above brings some example texts written by my sts during the first week of the Pownce experience.

Oh, the weekly tasks will cover structure and vocabulary students have learned that week.

What I´ve observed so far is that everyone is reading what all students are posting, they are learning from each other´s texts. They´ve been daring to use structure they haven´t seen in class yet and have been interacting not only with me (their teacher) but with each other.