MassCUE offered me the opportunity this past winter to offer an online professional development course through their site. Although I had offered online and asynchronous courses before through Moodle, this proposal involved learning and utilizing the Edmodo interface to build and deliver the course. Additionally, through this experience I was able to join a cohort of folks seeking to become Edmodo Certified Trainers. None of this would have happened without that MassCUE connection! I really enjoyed offering The Flipped Classroom through Edmodo. The professional commitment of the participants in my group was remarkable. As the MassCUE PD offerings net reaches so many educators, the class pool revealed a wide spectrum of backgrounds and teaching positions which contributed to rich professional dialogue in the posts. I think the flexibility of online learning works well for busy educators; they can complete course requirements when their time allows. In The Flipped Classroom, the participants completed the course with a practical unit they could use in their own content instruction. The entire course worked toward that goal of each member molding something that was valuable to her individual classroom. Offering the course online allowed this to happen seamlessly; all content was saved locally for teacher use while shared with me through the Edmodo interface. The parallel instruction worked toward the shared goal. I think each class member left the course with a takeaway in which they were proud and would be a valuable tool in their instruction. The Edmodo interface works well for any classroom/course setting. If you have not looked at Edmodo lately, you should have another look. It provides many features which teachers will love, as well as a closed community through which to deliver content. And teachers will love the new app Snapshot, which offers teachers the ability to assign summative assessments (tied to the CCSS) to their students!

About the Author: Anne Ford is recently retired from Falmouth Public Schools.  She has been designing online PD courses for the past five years.  She is a Google Certified Educator and Edmodo Certified Trainer.  Currently, she works as a content coach for LearnZillion.com, guiding literacy teams in creating and producing CCSS video lessons for their online platform.