Parent Account Updates

Based on teacher feedback and analysis of parent accounts, we’ve made a few new updates to parent accounts, including:

• Improved navigation: We’ve given parent accounts a new look! The new design will now have a dashboard from which parents can easily access their child’s grades and assignments.
• More accessible: Parent codes are now accessible from student profiles. This means that teachers will no longer need to distribute codes to parents.  Parents can easily obtain the code from their child’s profile and create their own Edmodo account to track their child’s school activities.
• Streamlined communication:  Based on feedback from teachers and analysis of how parents are currently using parent accounts, we’ve streamlined communication.
• To ensure security, since codes are now accessible by students, the parent account dashboard allows parents to view grades and assignments; however, direct messages to teachers can no longer be sent from the parent account.
• Parents can view important announcements and messages from teachers and administrators.

Post Moderation

Group owners can now elect to moderate posts. This new option is available in the group settings panel and if selected, requires the group owner to approve all posts and replies made by group members, before they are published to the group stream.

Note: Post moderation is also available on Android devices and will soon be available for iPhone devices.  Please update to the most current version of the app to utilize this feature.

French Language

We’re pleased to announce that Edmodo is now available in French! Select the French flag located at the footer of the site to switch the language. Merci beaucoup to our own, Jérôme Heuzé, for assisting with the translation.

District Administrator Badge

All school and district administrators associated with an Edmodo subdomain will now receive a badge. If you’re currently an administrator, check your profile for your new badge. If you haven’t claimed an Edmodo subdomain for your school or district, sign up now.

Last week we announced our new Android app update and today we are pleased to announce the new iPhone and iPad apps are available!

The latest version of the app gives teachers full access to their gradebook, allowing them to view and grade assignments directly from their mobile device.  For students, the new app provides the ability to turn in assignments and view all their grades.

Download the iOS or Android apps today and let us know what you think in the comments!

Assignment Annotation via Crocodoc 

Now you can publicize your group and invite others to join, without giving away the group code. The new “request to join URL” is a unique, auto generated URL that you can share with others to invite them to join your group. Upon selecting the URL, the person will have the option to send the group creator a request to join. The group creator will then receive a notification and can approve or deny the person’s request to join that group.

Quiz Enhancements

• Question bank: Once you create a quiz, all the questions will be saved in your personal question bank. The next time you create a quiz, you can load previously created questions, without having to retype them.
• Weighted questions: When you create a quiz, you now have the ability to weight each question. This means you can award more points for specific questions.
• Partial credit: Short answer questions can now be marked partially correct. For example, if the question is worth 5 points, and the student’s answer is only partially correct, you can award the student 3 of the 5 points.

Greek Language
The Greek flag has been added to the bottom of the Edmodo page. Select this flag to view Edmodo in Greek! Special thanks to Theodore G. Goutas, the Edmodo educator who completed the translation for the community.

Preview quiz: Before you assign a quiz to your group, you now have the option to preview that quiz. When you select the preview quiz option (located below the assign quiz button), you can start a quiz and navigate through the questions, viewing the quiz, just as a student would view it.

Comments: When grading a quiz, you now have the option to provide comments back to the student.  You can provide comments for each question and when students view their results, they will see those comments below each question.

In addition to these updates, we’ve put together a few new resources to help you learn more about quizzes.

• Frequently asked questions on quizzes
• Tips for creating quizzes
• How-to videos:
• Create a quiz
• Submit a quiz
• Grade a quiz

In the upcoming months we’ll continue to enhance the quiz functionality, while adding additional features on Edmodo, so please, keep those suggestions coming via our support community!

That’s it for quizzes this week — other updates include:

Printable Members Page: To support your classroom management needs, you can now generate printable rosters for each group.  Under the Manage Group section, under Parents and Printer Friendly, select “Member List with Stats” to generate a report that lists your students, parent codes, # of badges awarded, and other statistics based on the criteria you select.

Edmodo in German: Also, you’ll now notice a German flag on the bottom of the Edmodo page. Select this flag to view Edmodo in German. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be adding more languages to Edmodo – we’ll keep you updated as we release them.  Special thanks to Matthias Heil, the Edmodo educator who completed the translation for the community!  Thanks Matthias!

1.  Quizzes:  By popular demand, now you can create, assign and grade assessments using your own multiple choice, fill in the blank, short answer and True False questions.  Although our goal was to make it as simple and user friendly as possible, the new quiz feature has a lot of deeper functionality that we hope will make your assessments richer, while providing you greater efficiencies.  These features include: Ability to Re-take quizzes, Time limits, summary chart for each student’s quiz results, LaTex support (markup language for Math equations), and much much more.

2.  Updated Help Center:  We’ve redesigned the help center to provide you with easier access to the information you need, when you need it.  We’ll be updating the help center regularly with new information and content, so be sure to check it out regularly.

3.  Communities:  Based on feedback from teachers that they want communities to be a safe place to ask questions, share experiences and learn from each other, communities can now only be viewed by teachers and our publisher partners.  You’ll notice the link to communities is no longer available from student pages.

4.  About Us:  We’ve given our public pages a fresh new look. Get to know a bit more about the Edmodo team  – and feel free to click on our profile pics to link directly with any of us in Edmodo!

5.  Profile Photo-Cam:  Don’t have a pic for your profile?  No problem.  You can now take a picture right from your Edmodo settings page.  Simply select Account > Settings and you’ll see a “Take a Photo” link right about the profile picture area.

Hopefully this will provide a quick primer on the new features — stay tuned this week for more details and discussion on these new features! As always — please share your feedback!

From these discussions, we’ve added a few new requirements to the quiz functionality that will provide you with significantly more flexibility with respect to the types of questions you create and your ability to integrate media directly into your assessments.   We’re very excited about these additions and absolutely believe your feedback has significantly improved the overall functionality.

However, to make sure these new features are optimally built, tested and implemented, we have decided to reschedule the wide release by three weeks.

Thanks for your patience as we finish things up — we promise the wait will be worth the wait!  Stay tuned for the availability of quizzes later in September!

Folder Play View

If you haven’t visited your Edmodo Library lately, now there’s a great reason to.  We’ve added a slick new Play View option that allows you to see all the contents of a folder in Play View mode.

How it works: A URL is automatically generated for each folder you have in your library.  If the folder is shared with a group, you can provide the link to any group members to enable them to view the contents of that folder in Play View.  There’s also an option to mark the contents public, so anyone you share the link with can view the content in Play View.

Reply Button

No more scrolling through the list of 30 replies just to hit the reply button! Now we’ve added a reply option to the bottom of all comment threads.

Shared Badges

Last month we launched student badges and based on your feedback, we’ve now added the ability for teachers to share badges with one another!

How it works:

• If you are creating a new badge- When you select the “New Badge” option, tick the check box titled “Share this badge with other teachers”.
• If you want to share an existing badge- From the “My Student Badges” menu, select the badge you want to share and at the bottom of the pop up box, select the “edit badge” option.  On the next display, tick the check box titled “Share this badge with other teachers” and hit “save badge”.

Manage Members
The link to manage your group members has been moved to the upper right corner of the members section and we made some significant changes to the manage members panel.

How it works: The first thing you’ll notice is the new layout. All members are listed by name with their profile photo. If you select a member, you will see a preview of their profile on the right panel. Here you can remove them from the group, reset their password, award them with a badge or retrieve their parent code.

Search Updates

We made the search box more visible by moving it to the left side of the top navigation bar and we also some new functionality to it.  The search box supports searches by posts, teacher name, student name or community.  As you key in the name of the person your searching for, you will see results auto fill below the search box. (Note: You will only see auto fill results for the people you are connected with or those who are in the same group as you.).

Account Drop Down

A subtle but new change, we’ve consolidated some of the top navigation options into a drop down menu called Account.   Here you will find the settings panel, a link to our help center and the logout option.  If you are a district administrator, you will also see the option to switch over to your district administrator view.

In addition to the new student profile, badges and assignment features, Edmodo now includes some cool features of particular interest to subdomain holders and school and district administrators:

• Administrator Support Community:  Subdomain admins now have access to their very own community where they will be able to share best practices for implementing Edmodo in a school or district, as well as receive answers to technical questions from other subdomain holders and the Edmodo Support Team.
• Admin Notification Settings: Admins can also now receive email or SMS notifications for posts to their school or district community. To set your notification preferences or the settings for other admins, simply go to the Settings page of your Admin Account and select each administrator and the types of notifications you would like them to receive.
• IP Forwarding: In case you missed it, Edmodo now allows admins to forward traffic from specific IP addresses directly to a subdomain. This useful feature makes it easier for districts to roll out Edmodo by ensuring that all users within the district have automatic access to the subdomain and all the functionality that comes with it. To automatically redirect users to your subdomain, navigate to the Settings page of your Admin Account and enter the IP addresses, or range of addresses, for the schools in your district for which you would like to redirect traffic, and select Request Forward. Find out more.

Last night’s system upgrade included a few new exciting features including:

• Student profiles: Get more insight into each of your students through new student profiles! Students profiles allow you to view that student’s teachers, groups, classmates and recent activity.  This information is automatically generated based on their Edmodo activity, but the student can also share a little bit about themselves by selecting their learning style and career goal.  The ability to select a favorite quote is on the way!
• Badges: The new student profiles also include badges.  These new badges enable you to incentivize your students and provide recognition for their achievements. To award a badge, visit the profile of the student you’d like to award and select the “award badge” button at the top of their profile page. A panel will open up that will allow you to create a badge, or select from a list of Edmodo created badges.
• Assignment Filtering: New filtering will help you and your students organize and find assignments.  Simply filter your post by assignments (from the left navigation) and you will then see the ability to sort by those that are “coming due”, or “most recently posted” at the top of your stream.