ESL+Students+and+Edmodo

Kristin Horvath
 * ESL Students and Edmodo **

As a teacher in the 21st century, my goal is to prepare my students for their future as creatively and engagingly as I possibly can. Thanks to web 2.0 tools, I am able to provide my students with a wealth of resources and applications to enhance and extend their learning. The application of student learning and their ability to communicate and collaborate will be vital to their careers someday – let alone their ability to use technology strategies to carry out these tasks.

An application like [|Edmodo], a “private” social networking communication tool provided to students, allows students to question and share ideas in a protected online environment. The teacher is able to quickly provide tools, videos, documents, links, images, and feedback to students in their class only, as well as obtain feedback from the students through quizzes, polls, and assignments. Edmodo provides a safe communication environment for the students only in your class – preventing outside “noise” from public users – and allows students to openly question and share support with their peers.

For the past several years, I have had at least 2-3 students in my class who are considered ESL students at various levels. I have had some students whose parents speak a different language at home, but the students have strong knowledge of English. I have had some students with limited English knowledge, but then of course I have had some students who have come into my classroom knowing little to no English at all, which has proven to be quite challenging for the student and of course for me as the teacher. For ESL students, their social conversation develops very quickly. They learn quickly to communicate with their peers, ask for their wants and needs, and are able to express their opinions. Unfortunately, their academic language takes much longer to develop over time. An application like Edmodo can provide the students with the tools to strengthen their academic language, while giving them the freedom to express themselves through a web 2.0 tool without worry of being embarrassed or mispronouncing something out loud in class.

Edmodo for ESL students is a wonderful way to provide extra support for the content learned in the classroom. Videos can be uploaded to reinforce a lesson from earlier in the day. Files can be uploaded to the group or to an individual student for additional study support. Students can directly message the teacher for clarification, or students can post to the entire group with a question concerning a certain concept. Potential barriers for ESL students using Edmodo would be a basic translation and conjugation issue; however if the teacher provides the students with the tools to translate and conjugate correctly and use that as a learning goal, then students will have something to work towards as they are using the application. Expectations can be set with the ESL student that they must use complete sentences when communicating via Edmodo in order to build their language skills, but this application provides them an opportunity to communicate freely without oral communication barriers. I have used Edmodo for the past two years in my classroom and the application has been extremely effective with my ESL students, including students from Japan, France, and Germany. Those particular students found the resources to be a great way to break down social barriers at first with their peers, but then also as a way to express themselves in order to let the other students see what they are capable of without the language barrier.

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