Is Moodle Dead? Will Edmodo take over?

I recently received this question from our staff:

Brian, you’ve been promoting Edmodo a lot recently.  Is the district moving to Edmodo and phasing out Moodle?  Why don’t we standardize on one platform that everyone uses?

Short answer:  Moodle is staying,  Edmodo is staying… teachers will have the option to decide on the best tool(s) for their needs.  Over time, students and teachers will vote with their feet, errr…  clicks.

The rest of the story……………………

1) It seems you’ve been promoting Edmodo a lot lately…
Response:  This is correct, we ran two recent articles on Edmodo…  How Edmodo is used at Crossroads Park   and how Shannon Johnson used Edmodo for a classroom discussion.  However, what’s important is that the information for both articles came from the teachers and students.  They were geniunely excited about their experience with Edmodo and choose to write about it.  On the other hand, we’ve had Moodle in the district for at least 4 years – and it’s been a long time since I’ve received anything even close to the feedback we are seeing related to Edmodo.

In fact, our district conducts annual technology satisfaction surveys with our students.  Over the past two years, one of the questions focuses specifically on Moodle. We ask them how they feel about the following statement:

“I wish more of my classes used Moodle.”  Options for responding include: Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, or I don’t know/never used Moodle.  We then sum the strongly agree and agree percentages to arrive at an approval rating.

• In the spring of 2010, 25% of students wished that more classes used Moodle.
• In the spring of 2011, 23%  of students wished that more classes used Moodle.

Unfortunately, students have given our moodle usage the lowest approval rating of all questions asked on the survey.. for two years running.

Why is this?  Here’s my guess.. Our predominate usage of Moodle is online quizzes and posting of documents.  In comparison, Edmodo’s primary usage so far appears to be online discussions and assignment submissions. Moodle clearly can be used for online discussions – but it just seems that we aren’t using it for that purpose or that Edmodo is just easier for driving online conversations.

2) Are we as a district moving to Edmodo?
Response: As a district, we are always looking for options that meet the needs of our students and teachers…  but this doesn’t mean that we are ever going to force classrooms to you use either Moodle or Edmodo.

3) Are we phasing out Moodle?  Is Moodle dead?
Response: No… Moodle is not dead.  We might have some work ahead of us to related to how we use it, but Moodle will remain an option.

4) Why don’t we standardize on a single platform… wouldn’t that better for parents/students?
Response: At first glance, standardizing on a single platform does appear more uniform for everyone… but I don’t agree that this is truly best for everyone.  Nor is this realistic or possible.   Considering how many free web 2.0 resources are available to classrooms – it doesn’t seem possible or ideal to standardize.  If the tools each provide different features – then both might be needed.  And if over time they appear to be more and more identical… then I’m an advocate for letting teachers and students vote with their feet… er…  clicks, if you will.

Today I used Edmodo for discussions and…

I tried a class discussion on Edmodo today using a class set of laptops. I created 4-5 small groups in each American Lit class and posted the same questions to each group. My intention was to start with Edmodo and then move to oral discussion for the last half of class. However, they were so engaged that we just kept going with Edmodo. They did this for a solid 65 minutes!

Though not every group or question had the in-depth exchange of ideas I was hoping for, groups definitely improved over the course of the class period.  I asked students to send me feedback via a direct message at the end of the class. 46 out of 51 students preferred the online discussion over a typical seminar discussion because they enjoyed the think time, felt as though they had better focus, and appreciated the chance to participate without having to talk out loud in front of the whole class. People who never talk during class had lengthy, thoughtful, and in-depth comments to share with their classmates.  I even had a student who has an out of school suspension, but he was able to log into Edmodo and talk to his classmates in the same way he would have if he had been in the room.

I was excited by how well it worked—both in the level of participation by ALL students and in the quality of their comments. I still value the oral discussion and think students need to learn to be more comfortable with sharing their ideas in that way, but I will definitely do this again.

Shannon Johnson
Language Arts and Social Studies Teacher
Valley High School
johnsons@wdmcs.org