Google Classroom vs. Edmodo: Key Features and Services Comparison
Both Google Classroom and Edmodo are designed to help teachers supplement their classroom lessons. With both platforms, teachers can organize their course content, track assignment status and communicate with students. We’ve reviewed both Google Classroom and Edmodo and compared them to other LMS solutions in our comprehensive LMS Comparison Guide. In this post, we’ll discuss both solutions in more detail to help schools make the right purchasing decision.
Comparing Products
Here are excerpts from our Google Classroom and Edmodo reviews that summarize each solution:
Google Classroom: Google Classroom is part of the G Suite for Education (Google for Education) package that includes Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar and other apps. It’s targeted to teachers and students in both K-12 and higher education markets. Google Classroom is a free service for teachers and students and, like other Google products, takes only a few minutes to set up. However, they can’t register until their school signs up for the Google for Education package.
The main benefit of Google Classroom is that it’s simple to use and encourages collaboration between students and teachers. Teachers can create a class and list assignments in a few clicks. They can add students by name or send them a code to join. Students then can see what assignments are due, participate in discussion forums or message the teacher (either in private or via group chat).
Edmodo: Edmodo is a learning management platform that augments classroom learning with social learning for students and teachers in kindergarten to 12th grades. It has “freemium” pricing – meaning parents, teachers, students and even school districts can create their own accounts for free. Edmodo is set up like a social networking feed, similar to Facebook. Students, teachers and parents can communicate with posts, and other users can like or comment on them. Announcements, questions, tests and assignments are posted in the Edmodo feed.
As a boy, David Shariatmadari would sit in the hallway and listen to his Iranian father speaking Farsi on the phone to his family in Tehran. It was an early introduction to the estranging beauty of unfamiliar language. So began an interest in linguistics that has given birth to this book, a skilful summation of the latest research on how languages emerge, change, convey meaning and influence how we think.
Each chapter explodes a common myth about language. Shariatmadari begins with the most common myth: that standards of English are declining. This is a centuries-old lament for which, he points out, there has never been any evidence. Older people buy into the myth because young people, who are more mobile and have wider social networks, are innovators in language as in other walks of life. Their habit of saying “aks” instead of “ask”, for instance, is a perfectly respectable example of metathesis, a natural linguistic process where the sounds in words swap round. (The word “wasp” used to be “waps” and “horse” used to be “hros”.) Youth is the driver of linguistic change. This means that older people feel linguistic alienation even as they control the institutions – universities, publishers, newspapers, broadcasters – that define standard English.
Another myth Shariatmadari dismantles is that foreign languages are full of untranslatable words. This misconception serves to exoticise other nationalities and cultures, making them sound quaint or bizarre. It amuses us to think that there are 27 words for eyebrow in Albanian. But we only really think this because of our grammar-blindness about Albanian, which can easily form adjectival compounds by joining two words together.
Languages do shape how we think and act, but this usually happens not at the level of vocabulary but of linguistic structure. The psycholinguist John Lucy has given language as one explanation for the starkly different rates of workplace accidents in Sweden and Finland. In Swedish, prepositions allow for the nuanced account of actions over time; in Finnish, case endings stress static relationships. This may make Finns less alert to the temporal arrangement of a process, leading to more interruptions and accidents at work.
Shariatmadari borrows from Iris Murdoch’s idea of language as a net cast over the mind, constraining our thoughts according to how its knots and threads land – wrinkled in some places, straight in others. Every language is a different throw of the net. Language sieves and strains reality but never imprisons it. There are always holes for the real world to escape.
Shariatmadari’s general approach to language is pro-diversity and anti-pedantry. No linguist would disagree with his argument that a word’s meaning depends not on its etymology but on how it is used. (Adam Gopnik once wrote that prescriptivism was “as bogus a concept in linguistics as green cheese is in astronomy”.) But he fleshes out this argument usefully, offering ammunition against the tiresome hairsplitter who, for example, insists that “decimate” comes from the Roman practice of executing every tenth soldier as a collective punishment. (It doesn’t.)
He also rescues nonstandard forms, such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), from the routine condescension meted out to them. AAVE misses out the linking “to be” verb (“you late”) but then so do many other languages. The AAVE construction “he be singing” does not mean “he is singing” but “he sings [as a hobby, professionally]”. It is an efficient means of marking the habitual aspect. “Imma” for “I’m going to” is another standard linguistic move: cutting a word or phrase that is just a grammatical marker. “Imma” doesn’t work with the more literal sense of “going to”, which is why you can say “Imma let you finish” (I’m going to let you finish) but not “Imma the shops” (I’m going to the shops).
All languages move naturally towards abbreviation and compression, guided by what the linguist Rudi Keller calls “the invisible hand in language change”. Shariatmadari compares it to the desire path that forms on the lawn of a university campus after thousands of students have taken a short cut across it.
He is sceptical of Noam Chomsky’s notion of a universal grammar, the idea that human beings have a sort of syntax-generating implant in the brain. Language for Shariatmadari is not a piece of brain software but something that emerges when we interact with others. It is “a medium that is formed as it is used … a road that is paved at the same time as we walk it”.
This is quite a scholarly and serious book. I admired its refusal to lighten its denser arguments with that jokey “here comes the science bit” flippancy that so often grates in non-fiction books on complex topics. Shariatmadari’s style is never less than clear, but there isn’t too much handholding. His account requires a little patience, but then so does linguistics.
Stick with it and it is a meaty, rewarding and even necessary read. Shariatmadari begins by pointing to “an almost insatiable appetite for linguistic debate” in our culture. But as he then shows, most of the focus is trivial – “how to speak like a millennial” – or myth-ridden. Our wider culture seems profoundly uninterested in the dynamic, makeshift nature of language, the way that it gives birth to thought as much as articulates it.
Politicians, caught out saying something that they actually believe, instantly apologise for their “poor choice of words”. It is as if words were just a light dusting of salt on the meal of meaning, and not that important. But words, as Shariatmadari reveals, aren’t a condiment you sprinkle on top of reality; they are the marinade that alters the taste of everything.
This book makes a good case for seeing linguistics as “the universal social science”, one that teaches us not just about language but about how we live and make sense of the world. When we learn how the world is made through words, we also learn to be sceptical of our current iteration of reality and more tolerant of other perspectives. If life can be differently worded, it can be differently lived.
• Don’t Believe a Word is published by W&N (RRP £16.99). To order a copygo to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.
What does it mean to accuse someone of being 'wet'?
This is what the UK Prime Minister accused the BBC of, when it decided not to have people singing lyrics to a patriotic song at the 'Last Night of the Proms':
I think it’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions and about our culture, and we stopped this general bout of self-recrimination and wetness,” Boris Johnson said on Tuesday.
However, if you look at most renditions of this song at the Proms, you can see that both performers and audience have never taken it seriously - and with it being sung by... foreigners!
But after Brexit, this song and the evening it is sung on had already become part of the 'culture wars', when everyone takes it very seriously.
Story: “Rule, Britannia!” and “Land of Hope and Glory” were performed orchestrally at BBC’s Last Night of the Proms. The decision was in compliance with government guidelines to stop the spread of Covid-19, which clearly state that “people should avoid singing, shouting and raising voices.”
This week, and probably for the first time in modern history, everyone was talking about Last Night of the Proms. Conductor Dalia Stasevska found herself in the crossfires of the culture wars after the BBC’s decision for “Rule Britannia” and “Land of Hope and Glory” to be performed orchestrally – in line with government guidelines to stop the spread of COVID-19 – was reported as a “politically motivated” decision.
At its simplest, linking is the merging of multiple words together until they sound as if they are only one word. Native speakers of English all do this naturally. Linking is an advanced topic for non-native speakers, but learning to correctly link words can result in significantly more fluid and fluent sounding English speech. Failing to link words naturally results in spoken English which may have awkward pauses, extra, unnecessary sounds, and which will sound very foreign to native speakers.
But what if setting growth free from CO2 emissions will just take more time, and more technology — bigger batteries, for example, and cheaper solar panels? Cameron Hepburn, a professor of environmental economics at the University of Oxford, points out that there have been many instances in history where society has replaced a heavily polluting technology with a more efficient, cleaner technology — shifting from, say, kerosene lamps to incandescent lights to LED bulbs — without sacrificing growth. Why should the quest for fossil fuel-free energy be any different? “The thing I object to most is the idea that, just because it hasn’t been done yet, it can’t be done,” Hepburn said. He points out that degrowth hasn’t been tried, either — and so the hypothetical choice for governments is between two relatively unproven pathways. Post-COVID, should countries rethink their obsession with economic growth? | Grist
And it works largely because it makes a game out of learning:
Duolingo has an appealing, playful design and a smooth Onboarding experience. Choose the language you want to learn, set a daily goal and immediately start completing guided exercises. The exercises are short, only 10 questions long at first, and shouldn’t take more than 2-3 minutes to complete. Several embedded game mechanics add motivational boosts to make sure that new users reach their first win-states quickly: A progress bar shows how close you are to completing the exercise. Each correct answer is rewarded with an encouraging sound effect. In between questions, Duo, the mascot owl, will comment on how great you are doing.
“Motivating yourself to learn is very hard and learning a language is even harder, especially when you are doing that online on your own, so we realized early on that we needed to try to encourage people to form a daily learning habit. We found that the most effective techniques for this come from the gaming world,” explains associate product manager Zan Gilani.
Unfortunately, all Duolingo had borrowed from the contemporary gaming culture are some ubiquitous tropes like in-game currency, experience points, daily streaks, badges and leaderboards. These are the things that are not making Duolingo more game-like, but the things that are making the gaming experience more bureaucracy-like and ruining it. There is no intrinsic value in being compelled to log in every day and beat others to the top spot in some arbitrary group. I ignore all of that because I'm here to learn a language, not to beat others to it.
You can see all this 'technology for all' as the result of our current system:
In 1919, the Frigidaire was the first self-contained refrigerator. It cost $775 (over $11,000 in today’s money). As the average hourly wage in 1919 was just $0.43, it took the average American 1,802 hours of work to afford this luxury appliance.
Today, the standard Whirlpool French door refrigerator holds 25 cubic feet’s worth of food and drink. It has “fingerprint resistant stainless steel” and costs just $1,529. According to the latest BLS statistics, it would take the average American just 57.5 hours of work to be able to afford this – now common – appliance. (The average wage today is $26.55 per hour.)
As Marian L. Tupy of the Cato Institute previously pointed out, “an ordinary person today lives better than most kings of yesteryear,” thanks to innovation, capitalism and mass production. As we wait for the warm weather to return, we should be thankful that virtually all Americans have access to refrigeration and, thus, the ability to store food all year round.
And the Guardian looks at how 'technology' can have very different uses:
Technology is making the world more unequal. Only technology can fix this
Here’s the bad news: technology – specifically, surveillance technology – makes it easier to police disaffected populations, and that gives badly run, corrupt states enough stability to get themselves into real trouble. Here’s the good news: technology – specifically, networked technology – makes it easier for opposition movements to form and mobilise, even under conditions of surveillance, and to topple badly run, corrupt states. Inequality creates instability, and not just because of the resentments the increasingly poor majority harbours against the increasingly rich minority. Everyone has a mix of good ideas and terrible ones, but for most of us, the harm from our terrible ideas is capped by our lack of political power and the checks that others – including the state – impose on us.
One particular idea running through much of this is that of 'technological discontinuity' - and even those who use the term are not clear exactly what they mean by it:
Science fiction is a good way to look at these things.
In this video, at 10:30, the critic Will Self looks at the difference between movies of the 1950s which gave us futures with jet packs and eating pills; but the 1982 film Blade Runner gives us a dirty and messy future.
And what we find is a future of 'discontinuous technologies' where one technology which you would think is obsolete exists alongside the shiny new technology.
He calls this 'steam punk' - and every age is this 'steam punk' age, because we are always surprised that we don't all get the same new tech at the same time.
The future is not going to be 'all wipe-able surfaces'.
The film Solaris is very different to the other film of the same time, 2001:
Will Self also challenges the idea given in the first link above to the TED Talk by Hans Rosling.
The end of the Apollo missions into space ended a vision of a shiny, metallic future. And in place of optimistic and Promethean space operas such as Stanley Kubric's 2001, science fiction began to mutate into 'steam punk', which saw technological development as 'asynchronous'.
And without a vaccine for covid, we won't be able to rely on medical technologies which have made it possible for humans to live in high densities while travelling frequently and en masse.
In other words, we are not 'all in this together', with some enjoying access to hi-tech medicine to fight the coronavirus pandemic, and others not.
We’re on the Brink of Cyberpunk It’s not just the technology, surveillance, and dystopian vibes—it’s the culmination of decades of deliberate governmental erosion. By KELSEY D. ATHERTON APRIL 08, 20209:00 AM
Where is the president in Blade Runner? Beneath the 1982 neo-noir’s trappings of genetically engineered human automatons is a story about corporate power over and indifference to life, alienation in the face of wealthy indifference to the plight of workers. Replace the Tyrell Corporation with Amazon and reframe the replicants as “essential services,” and suddenly you have a world of workers terrified that their jobs are inherently a death sentence—moving straight from fiction to reality. But while Blade Runner’s once-distant future of November 2019 feels resonant in so many ways—vast corporate power, persistent surveillance, life in a time of constant crisis—it misses the actual 2019’s most salient feature: an inescapable, painful awareness of politics and of the presence or deliberate absence of government in daily life. Government, as experienced for much of the 20th century, is largely absent from the lives of characters in cyberpunk stories. Police are a durable feature, but government services and functions beyond the security state are absent. Yet for all the aggressive visibility of politics in our daily lives, we’re not that far off from the powerlessness of a cyberpunk future. Cyberpunk speaks to the present because the conditions that inspired cyberpunk remain largely unchanged. As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps through the world, it collides with governments in the West that have spent decades deliberately shedding power, capability, and responsibility, reducing themselves to little more than vestigial organs that coordinate public-private partnerships of civic responsibility. This hollowing of the state began in earnest in the 1980s, and the science fiction of that time—the earliest texts of cyberpunk—imagines what happens when that process is complete. Cyberpunk is a genre of vast corporate power and acute personal deprivation. The technologies at the center of it are all means of control, control bought by the wealthy or broken by criminals. Where recourse is available, in whatever small way, it’s through direct action.
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