LOA Diaries: Humans of Edmodo

At +Edmodo I was excited to participate in q. my first hackathon.  My director, +Kevyn Klein had an idea that I thought would be fun and engaging, a riff on Humans of New York called Humans of Edmodo.

We sent out a request using influitive Teacher Leader Network and received some great quotes and pictures from the teachers who use Edmodo. 

Our team included Kevyn, Nick Jarvis, a graphic artist, Vivienne Pustell, Rachel Sherman & of course all of the teachers who made our project possible. We collected quotes and pictures throughout the afternoon and worked on the images late into the evening. We communicated almost exclusively through +HipChat each of us at our own location, but collaborating as a team. Most of our team used Canva, a free and easy to use design program to add teacher quotes to the images, creating sometimes thoughtful and sometimes funny, and sometimes both, posters. Kevyn even recruited her fiancee for some voice over work on our introduction video.

Friday morning, I arrived in the office early to work on the presentation with Kevyn while Vivienne waited for Target to open. When it opened, she bought almost every frame they had in the sizes we needed. Rachel was busily multitasking - supporting customers and printing all of the images. As she was printing, Vivienne and I started framing the posters. Once we had them all framed, we hung them in every conference room and in team rooms so that Edmodo staff could always have a customer with them in the room, a Human of Edmodo.

We took pictures of the hanging work, and pulled everything together into a Google presentation which we would show the judges at 2:00 to describe what we had done.  After presenting our project, The Humans of Edmodo, and all of the other hackathon projects were submitted, the judges, including yours truly, retired to the large conference room for deliberations. Although I had agreed not to take part in the judging of our category, I couldn't help myself and pointed out the beautiful photos that were now gracing the walls.

Again, I found myself planning how I could take this idea back to my students... The Humans of Bagby, or making memes with historical figures, character building quotes (The Bagby Bs), these are the things that keep my head spinning at night... So many ideas, so little time (#IMCAST)...if you have other ideas, I'd love to hear them.

I am really proud of what we accomplished in 24 hours and I love how each of us brought our own design sensibilities and strengths to the project.  And yeah, I like that we won, too!
 

LOA Diaries: Edmodo - Judging the Hackathon

Allison kicks off the presentation of projects

I was honored to be included on the judging panel for our Hackathon. I loved hearing about the amazing things these teams had accomplished in just 24 hours. I am always willing share my opinion, when I feel safe to do so. I do think most of the engineers valued a teacher, their customer's perspective. Chris presented a project to filter and block malicious links from being posted to +Edmodo. It occurred to me that there is much that goes on behind the scenes that we customers never see. From the judges table I pointed out that teachers, really any customer, will not be shy in letting you know when your product does not meet expectations, doesn't work, is slow. But there is much work engineers do to protect our students and keep them safe, without us even knowing. I thanked him for that.  And the most adorable thing happened, he blushed! Working in safety and security, he usually only hears about from customers when something doesn't work. It may very well be the first time a customer had thanked him for his work. This was a good reminder to me to show gratitude more often. 

In addition to Zach's formatting project, as each group presented I realized how many of the projects were designed to enhance the user experience, from giving us bigger video viewing area to more content in Spotlight, to helping new teachers get comfortable with Edmodo, the customers really are foremost in Edmodo's work, even in their passion projects..

The Judges (yes, bribes are on the table, chocolate and wine)

Despite jokes about accepting bribes, I did recuse myself from deliberations regarding my team and our category of Company Culture. And yet, our project, Humans of Edmodo, won!  So in addition to experiencing this inspirational event, our team won $500 for each member! That never happens in public education.  Even better, +Zach Rutta, who had done his initial presentation alone and had asked for engineers to help him create something teachers had been wanting for years, won the grand prize!  So really I felt like I won twice!

As I was drinking a celebratory plastic cup (recycle able of course) with the judges, we explored the idea of bringing the Hackathon concept into staff development days and classrooms on campuses. It would be interesting to see what could be accomplished. I'm not sure the union or parents would approve of a 24 hour project but imagine if we gave teachers and/or students a focused, dedicated block of time to pursue a project they thought could make a difference...whatever that means to them! I'm still working on how to implement it, but I think there is potential there. Participants develop perseverance, creativity, communication and collaboration which are all critical skills for future ready teachers and students.

I am a Human of Edmodo

                             

LOA Diaries: Edmodo - The Hackathon

I admit I had no idea what a Hackathon was. I thought a bunch of people sat around eating stale pizza, drinking Red Bull and hacking into other people's software. The term definitely had negative connotations, and after a very unscientific poll, many of my contemporaries have the same impression, but we couldn't be more wrong. "A hackathon is an event where people with diverse skill sets work collaboratively to create solution-oriented technology," writes Claire Shorall, of the Teaching Channel.

Our hackathon started at two o'clock on a Thursday and ended 24 hours later.  It's a 24 hour period when everyone can set aside their usual work and create a passion project. I normally skip the all hands meetings but was intrigued, so I sat through the kick-off, MC-ed by +Allison Laureano . I was interested to hear the wide variety of projects that mostly fit into four categories: features, monetization, culture and fixes. Of course I listened with a teacher's ear and I couldn't help myself but cheer out loud to +Zach Rutta's proposal of giving +Edmodo  users (mostly teachers) the ability to use bold, italics and underline formatting in our posts. It seems like a simple thing but it's funny how much you miss it when you don't have it. And currently Edmodo doesn't have it. Zach's was the project that directly addressed something I as a user want! Between my background in Customer Service and the fact that I am a customer of Edmodo, I felt heard.

Speaking of feeling heard... I've met a few times now with a coworker named +Kul Wadhwa, yes, pronounced cool and he is. He has been asking me what I think about a certain Edmodo product and I have been at times brutally honest with him, and he keeps coming back for more. Teachers are not often asked what they think about products nor given a real voice, outside our classrooms, so it's been refreshing to be asked. After I met with Kul one day, another man came up and asked if I'd be willing to give my input about some changes being made to Edmodo. Of course I said yes, I am always happy to give my opinion. I knew he was some sort of manager but I found out - after we spoke - that he is the General Manager, Manish Kothari. I love how accessible everyone is at Edmodo. There is no overt sense of managerial hierarchy that prevents anyone from talking to anyone else...quite refreshing.  A few minutes later Manish introduced me to CEO Vibhu Mittal and they asked me to be on the Hackathon judges panel, since I was a teacher! Talk about feeling heard!! I was thrilled to accept and rearrange my schedule to be in the office the next day.

Cheers to our hard work!

I'd pretty much already decided I was coming in when my Director, +Kevyn Klein intrigued me with her idea for a project, Humans of Edmodo.The excitement was almost palpable in the office that afternoon. Some people work at the office throughout the night. When I left at 6 p.m. to catch my train so I could get home to let the dog out, the GM was pouring people wine and IT was making dinner. We worked on our project well into the late hours, communicating with +HipChat  and I was excited to see what would be accomplished by all the teams overnight!