Schoology Overview
Schoology is a Learning Management System (LMS) that allows teachers to create, manage, and share content and resources. Its services include class management, attendance records, online gradebooks, tests and quizzes, and homework drop boxes. Schoology also includes a social media interface that facilitates collaboration among a class, group, or school. Native mobile applications for the program are available on iOS, Android, and Kindle Devices. Lastly, Schoology integrates with Google Drive to leverage the cloud storage services and document creation capabilities of this platform.
What is Schoology?
Steps for Using Schoology
If you look up at the top of your screen, you'll see four different "profiles" on the left—Home, Courses, Groups, and Resources—and some icons and your name on the right. This top navigation is always available, no matter where you are on the site. Make sure to familiarize yourself with it, because you'll be using it a ton.
And keep in mind that Schoology streamlines navigation. There are multiple ways to get basically anywhere you want to go, so don't hesitate to try something new and see what happens.
Home Page
Your Home Page is where you will start every time you log in to Schoology. Why? Because it's the best way, as you're having your morning coffee, to catch up on all the important happenings that relate to you, your courses, and your groups. Your Home Page is perfect for sending mass messages, posting updates, making calendar events, and simply preparing yourself for your day.
There are four main components to your Home Profile:
Nearly everything on this page is clickable for quick and efficient navigation, so click away.
- Left Side Navigation—Allows you to access your personal calendar, messages, apps, and the like.
- Central Column—This column shows the page you are viewing based on the left side navigation. You'll always start on the Recent Activity Feed, a condensed feed of posts that relate to you, your courses, and your groups. It enables you to post updates, announcements, and polls with files and links attached.
- Reminders—This area can help keep you quickly informed of student homework submissions, ungraded items, etc.
- Upcoming Feed—All your assignments, due dates, and calendar events are organized in chronological order.
The Resource Center
The Resource Center is a centralized place where all of your instructional and professional development materials are kept. It is closely tied to your courses (the main reason I'm addressing it before Groups in this blog) and is a place where you can manage all your files, assignments, assessments, learning outcomes, and badges.
You can import files, create new resources, and copy or move them into any or all of or your courses quickly from the Resource Center. You can also share resources with your groups and download them from our Public Resource Library. Any course materials, folders, and even entire courses can be copied for use on a later date.
If you use folders to organize everything in your courses, they will stay just as organized when you move them to your resources. If you don't, everything will be loose and much harder to find and repurpose.
The Resource Center has three main sections:
- Left Side Navigation—This enables you to switch between your Personal, Public, and Group Resources
- Collections—These are your personal and shared resource collections (one step above folders organizationally) and integrated external resources such as Google Docs and Khan Academy.
- Resources—This is where you can create, view, edit, and manage all your instructional resources.
Why Use Schoology?
Schoology's classroom management suite offers all of the tools that a teacher would use to support a connected online learning environment. Attendance, grade book (traditional & standards-based), online posting of assignments and assessments. Teachers can create online quizzes & tests. This practice can provide instant feedback to the students, and differentiation opportunities for teachers. One distinct advantage that Schoology offers over many other LMS products is the ability for faculty and students to have a complete and reciprocal document workflow from within the application.
Cost and Other Key Factors
Schoology's instructional components are FREE to teachers, students, and parents. (An Enterprise version allows for additional school management, developer, and analytic tools.) Teachers can create a code for parents to follow along with the course, as well as, monitor the progress of their son or daughter. Nearly all of our high school students are familiar with Facebook. This makes Schoology attractive and easy for them to navigate and learn. Also, almost all of our teachers were able to create an account, build a course, collect a few resources, join a group or two, and begin posting online course materials within their first hour of professional development training. Students appreciate being able to access class materials from anywhere and at any time. Administrators have found Schoology to be a terrific organizational, communication, and management tool for faculty and staff.
Additional Considerations
Due to Schoology's array of features and possibilities, teachers should try a gradual rollout. Start out by creating a host course for additional resources like videos or informational text, practice assessments, and homework help discussions. After students become knowledgeable in navigation and use, you can upload tasks, create assessments, and integrate engaging discussion opportunities. Then make a push to go paperless. Evaluate and provide feedback to student work on the site, and allow for students to apply the feedback and resubmit assignments. Finally, boost the home-to-school connection by making a parent page where assignments, deadlines, and class announcements can be posted and where virtual parent meetings can take place, thanks to the privacy of the site's messaging feature.
Any content-area teacher can use Schoology to push engagement and learning from the classroom to anywhere students go. Alternatively, trainers can host school/county professional development on Schoology. There's no shortage of features to customize the learning environment to your needs. In fact, it's so loaded with possibilities that it can feel like a bit much. To make things easier, teachers and students both will want to run through the tutorials to get a handle on things. Once the getting-to-know-you period is over, teachers can engage students in rigorous tasks, assessments, and discussions using teacher-designed and uploaded curriculum. It's a perfect platform for skill extension, content scaffolding, and time management, especially for more tech-savvy secondary students on-the-go. (There are app versions.) Teachers provide quick feedback and communication to students and parents and keep track of student progress using badges, a gradebook, email/app notifications, and workload monitoring (with the enterprise version). With thoughtful implementation and consistent use, students and teachers will be able to upload, create, collaborate, and check progress with relative ease.