ISSUE: Edmodo Enables Misuse and Bullying
DISCUSSION: In a 48 hour period, my daughter's 4th grade class of 24 students posted nearly 2000 posts. There was cyber-bullying, threats, sexual comments and strong innuendos, false claims of ongoing burglaries and fires, and a student posted a graphic picture, and more... The Edmodo site is enabling this mostly unsupervised behavior. Edmodo allows unfiltered posting of pictures, media, web-links, and chat. There are no auto-filters, no smart scanners, etc. to find and filter web-sites, media postings, or text messages. Its obvious that a single teacher cannot properly monitor the great volume of chat that is sure to continue if allowed and enabled. The most a teacher can do, if they "catch" something wrong (though not likely out the nearly 1000 posts a day from a single class- many of which become hidden due to compression), the most they can do is try to fix things after the fact. Of the nearly 2000 posts that I spent 4+ hours reviewing, only 2, yes, 2 out of nearly 2000, or close to 1/10th of 1%, actually pertained to classwork or homework. This needs to be addressed and FIXED.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
For users 18 years and younger (i. E. Edmodo accounts for elementary, middle and high school- which is probably where 90%+ of Edmodo users are):
-Limit Chat: only allow a maximum of 5 posts per day (without this, it is unreasonable to expect adequate adult supervision)
-Keep it All Visible & Easy for Adults to Review: do not compress any discussions-- it should all be easily seen by parents and teachers
-Keep Graphic Pictures & Documents Off: do not allow the posting of documents or pictures (other than possibly submitting an assignment directly to a teacher)
-Filter It: incorporate a filter to disallow certain language and red flag inappropriate/bullying posts- and send a notice to the teacher and parent of such an event
Without these recommendations, Edmodo will continue to Enable Misuse and Bullying- providing an unsupervised arena for our children... Not to mention the early indoctrination of our children into embracing social media, as Edmodo has a Facebook feel to it.
These concerns were raised to Edmodo administrators over 6 months ago, and nothing has been fixed- other than they posted a parental permission form for schools to use that makes Edmodo sound like it's some great thing... In actuality, our children would probably be much better off if it didn't exist.