Edmodo and Wallwisher - Interesting tools to work with the students

Reading the post called "5 tools for online collaboration" on August 23rd from the blog Classroom in the Cloud, I found those tools really interesting for me, so I decided to give a try.

Two links called my attention, and I was intrigued to learn and test them.

One of them is Edmodo, very similar in aspect to Facebook, it is designed to help teachers to be in contact with the students. You just have to create an account and from then on, you decide what to do. Some of the options that were interesting for me, are the chances you have to create groups that will have a special code, then, you will give those codes to your students. Imagine you have 4 different groups of students, you will create 4 groups in edmodo, every group will have a special code, and students will be able to enter, create an account and with the special code, they will be part of the group you have created. This gives you the chance to assign tasks, put information, documents, links, among other things to share with your students. And they can write you back through posts, so you will have feedback. At the same time, you can create groups for parents, which is a good idea to be in contact with their parents too. You can create polls so students can answer some questions about the content for example. And as edmodo is a page for teachers, you can try to contact other teachers too. I really can't wait to use this page with my own students. ( I am already thinking in creating a poll to know the opinion that my students have about the classes).

Another tool was Wallwisher. This page is really simple, but it can have a great potential. First you have to create an account, and then create a wall. You can manage the options, but in simple words, you can allow anybody to leave a message in your wall. You can add images, videos or pages links too. It is a good tool for students to work in groups or teams, to organize information, to summarize contents, to create vocabulary lists, etc. (I am already thinking that if my students don't want to use edmodo to give their opinions about my class, then they can leave anonymous messages with their opinions in wallwisher).