Edmodo is a popular tool with teachers for building collaborative classroom communities. Its features such as notes and replies, polls, quizzes, assignments, and gradebook, as well as the Edmodo app store have provided teachers with the means to engage their students in active learning.

Recently, Edmodo provided a group of users with access to an early release of a new free app called Snapshot. It’s already creating a lot of conversation among the members of that group. Here is an introductory video to tell you more.

Building a Snapshot

Snapshot is designed to allow teachers in grades 3-12 to quickly build a micro-assessment based on the Common Core Standards. For example, if you’ve been working on main idea and details in your classroom, you can open the Snapshot app, choose a group and grade level then select ELA. Check off the standards that you want to address, name the Snapshot, set a due date and choose a time limit.  Click on the Assign Now button and your students will see the assigned Snapshot in the main discussion stream.  This can all be accomplished in less than 5 minutes.

Viewing the Data

The results of student performance on a Snapshot are very visual and easy to quickly interpret. Reports are shown in three ways: Focus, Students and Standards. The Focus report is a visual representation of how students are achieving according to the individual standards. A popup shows how students are grouped according to their achievement of the standards that have been assessed.

The Students Report helps you dig deeper into the data by providing information about each student according to each assessed standard.  These are color coded so you can quickly review each student’s status. A quick click on each standard will show questions/tasks that students were presented within the Snapshots they’ve completed. This provides an easy way to explore what types of questions were challenging to students.

The final view of data by Standards provides you with color coded information about each individual standard. The color codes in each circle represent the percentage of students achieving at each level: Meets, Borderline, Behind or Incomplete.

Additional Features

Snapshot has a few other features that teachers will find helpful:

• Students do not see the same texts and questions at the same time.  This way no two students can compare their work.
• Time limits for completing the assessment are adjustable.
• Snapshots can be scheduled so you can plan their use into your ongoing instruction.
• If students leave the browser during an assessment, a message is displayed at the top of their window and the teacher receives a notification.
• A sample question for the chosen standard can be viewed as you build a Snapshot.
• Students can take a Snapshot from any mobile device.
• Teachers receive an email notification about the results of a Snapshot.

Edmodo is continuing to work on improving Snapshot for release to the entire community very soon (US only for now).  We’ll be sure to let you know when that happens. (UPDATE: This is now available to all US teachers.)