Item: Schoology Learning
Rating: 7
Author: Lauren Ridenour

Overall Satisfaction with Schoology

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Schoology is used as the digital interface for which students in the middle school can access a schedule of their assignments, retrieve digital copies of handouts/resources, or access links to resources for each class. It is used by the middle school as a whole for each of the core content classes. Students who may have forgotten to write down their homework or had lost an important copy of something to complete an assignment were able to login to Schoology and find both what they had for homework and when it was due as well as digital copies of any handouts, notes, study guides, etc. All categories are by chapter or topic.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Organized documents, files, links by topic in neat folders. Made it very easy for unorganized students to find what they need
Tracked due dates of assignments
Interface like Facebook presented the information in a format that was familiar to the age group. When I posted a "status" update, the students knew it was a reminder or change of information because of their experience with facebook

Cons

Link to Google Drive
Ability to check off when students have completed an assignment so that they may self-regulate
Share grades back with students
Make folders invisible (this way you can prepare items early yet not be seen by all)
Opportunity to copy folders from one year to the next. If I've created a folder with the many resources for a particular novel unit, it would be nice to be able to copy that from one year to the next without creating new page/folder

Return on Investment

More responsibility placed on student
Easily approachable to students familiar with interface

Alternatives Considered

Schoology

Moodle - Schoology was drastically better than Moodle because it created an interface that was familiar to both teacher and student. The screen was crisp, neat, and organized and students could see where they needed to go to retrieve documents. Schoology made it easy to organize work within the class and link PDFs, links, docs, etc. to any page.

Likelihood to Recommend

Schoology is well suited for classes such as Language Arts, Social Studies, and/or Math where many notes and handouts are taken and given. Organizing the handouts and resources into folders made the many PDFs approachable to students who could open the folder they needed to find what it was they were looking for.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Middle Schooled in Schoology